MEASURING THE AGRIBUSINESS GDP IN EUROPEAN UNION COUNTRIES

The purpose of this paper was to measure the Gross Domestic Product of the agribusiness in European Union countries and to determine its contribution to national economies. The agribusiness GDP was measured using a proprietary method based on input-output tables. The study covered all 28 European Union countries and relied on 2014 data, the most recent available information in the World Input-Output Database (used as data source). The study found the prevalence of two relationships; (i): the higher the development level of a country, the lower the share of agribusiness GDP in the national economy; (ii): as the country develops, the share of the 2nd agribusiness aggregate in the GDP becomes relatively smaller compared to that of other agribusiness aggregates. A known problem faced in these analyses is that the I/O tables are published with a huge delay and are only available for some countries. Therefore, the studies on agribusiness measurement for all European Union countries in one period are relatively scarce in the relevant literature. Also, a proprietary method of agribusiness GDP measurement was used which takes account of the particular role of the food industry.