Comparative analysis of the socio-economic developments and competitiveness of the

Comparative analysis of the socio-economic developments and competitiveness of the agri-food sector at a sectoral and macro level in the pre-accession countries EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This study is a part of the project “Comparative analysis of agricultural sectors and rural areas in the pre-accession coun. [...] The overall aim of the project was to gain more knowledge on the state of development of the agri-food sector in the Western Balkans countries (WB) and Türkiye as well as on the approximation of agriculture and rural development policies with the CAP, in order to be able to better design the instrument for the application of pre-accession assistance for rural development (IPARD) in the pre-accessi. [...] To address the above-mentioned objective, a set of specific sub-objectives has been defined, corresponding to different tasks: • Collection of relevant data on and comparative analysis of market prices of the main agricultural products including the level of revenues and costs, • Collection of relevant data on and comparative analysis of output value and yields of the main agricultural products, •. [...] • Improve agricultural data collection through FADN: - The competitiveness and the performance of the countries are assessed on the basis of the quality and the availability of the data. [...] Because the aim of this research is to perform a comparative analysis of the macro- economic and agricultural developments and to benchmark the competitiveness of the IPARD countries with each other and with the EU, a necessary condition for the data collection is that data are available and comparable for all or at least the majority of IPARD and EU countries.