In the course of economic development there is a general downward trend of agricultural employment. In the EU-15, agricultural employment decreased by 2.3% p.a. (measured in regular persons) and 3.0% p.a. (measured in annual working units) between 1995 and 2000. In some of the new EU Member...

This paper investigates the impact of labour force composition on productivity in EU arable farming. We test the heterogeneity of family and hired labour for a set of eight EU member states. To this end, we estimate augmented production functions using FADN data for the years 2001-2008. The...