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

The report has the following structure: • Methodology (Section 2); • Cross-country overview of the main macroeconomic indicators in the IPARD countries (Section 3); • Cross-country overview of the main agricultural sector indicators in the IPARD countries (Section 4); • Cross-country overview of market prices of the main agricultural products and revenues and costs in the IPARD countries (Section. [...] 16 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 In addition, a separate Annex called “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; country fact sheets”, is published w. [...] Thus, the comparative 20 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 analysis of the competitiveness is carried out at two levels, at macro-level (country) and at agricultural sector level. [...] For the showcase product, the NEs have collected information on prices and provided a short general qualitative description of the developments in the production and the strengths and potential weaknesses of the producers. [...] We have used the following method: calculating the z-scores of the observations as compared to the EU-average (Van Berkum, Wijnands, and Verhoog 2016).6 6 The z-score of the normal distribution is equal to the deviation of between the observed value for country x and mean of all countries, divided by the sample standard deviation.