While agricultural productivity rises in Europe, Malta experiences 11.1% decline

While the level of agricultural labour productivity has risen in the European Union as a whole, the level in Malta has decreased by a whopping 11.1% - the second largest decline across the continent.

Data published by the European Union’s statistics body Eurostat shows that there was an estimated 2% rise in terms of the index for agricultural labour productivity, hence starting to reverse a decline registered between 2017 and 2018. The estimates are based on the latest figures for 2019.

It means that the European Union has seen a productivity rise in terms of agricultural labour of 23.1% since the start of the decade in 2010.

While several countries registered significant increases in agricultural labour productivity, Malta was not one of them; in fact the country registered the second largest decline throughout 2019 with Slovenia being the only country to register a higher decline.

11 countries in total registered a decline: Hungary (0.3%), the Netherlands (1.3%), Romania (1.8%), Italy (2.6%), Luxembourg (6.1%), Croatia (6.7%), France (8.3%), Spain (9.5%), Slovakia (10.6%), Malta (11.1%), and Slovenia (12.5%).

It should be noted that three of the large countries which contribute almost half of the EU factor income reported decreases: Spain, France, and Italy.

At the other end of the spectrum, while countries such as the

Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, and Cyprus registered only negligible increases, others registered much larger improvements.

Denmark for instance registered a huge 68.2% in agricultural labour productivity in 2019 when compared to 2018, with Estonia and Germany being the countries with the next largest increases – 38% and 31.8% respectively.

Sweden and Lithuania saw increases of 28.2% and 27.4% respectively, while increases in Latvia, Belgium, and Finland all exceeded 10%.

Delving deeper into the statistics shows that Malta has the lowest agricultural labour productivity performance with an estimate of 72 points in 2019.

Belgium, with 83.81, is the next lowest, followed by Finland and the Netherlands which are on 89.11 and 93.19 respectively.

Malta’s score has been lower in the past; it stood at 69.91 (a massive decrease from 94.91 in the previous year) in 2016, and then at 63.75 in 2017.

It then rose to 81.02 in 2018, before slumping to the current estimated score of 72 this year.

Bulgaria is the best performer meanwhile in Europe with a score of 241.82, followed by Slovakia with 180.08, Hungary with 172.17, Latvia with 164.62, and the Czech Republic with 143.99.

The European Union average score stands at 123.10 while that of the Euro area stands at 114.92.