Competitiveness analysis of agricultural enterprises in Slovakia

Abstract

Competitiveness can be analysed at various levels of the economy: at the product level, the enterprise level, the sector level, or the level of the entire economy. Several measures exist for each of these levels. This paper focuses on those used for the analysis of enterprises, particularly agricultural enterprises farming in Slovakia. Our research has been done on a selected sample of agricultural enterprises farming in Slovakia. Using "Recourse Cost Ratio" (RCR coefficient) has allowed investigating the differences in competitiveness between co-operatives and business companies, between the enterprises farming in better and worse soil and natural conditions as well as among various size groups of 111 agricultural enterprises. The research has proved that the optimal values of RCR coefficient revealed, that the common feature of all the competitive enterprises was their type of production oriented on solely plant production, possibly plant and meat production (there was no case of competitive enterprise with solely meat production). As for the different legal forms, we found out that more competitive were business companies than co-operatives. Considering different soil and natural conditions, there were better results observed in the group of enterprises farming in better soil and natural conditions.

Keywords

• competitiveness
• agricultural enterprise
• recourse cost ratio