Zastosowanie hierarchicznej klasyfikacji aglomeracyjnej do grupowania krajów Unii Europejskiej ze względu na strukturę i skalę produkcji gospodarstw rolnych
The Use of the Agglomeration Hierarchical Classification to Group the EU Countries according to the Structure and Scale of Farms’ Production

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the article was an attempt at delimitation of countries in the EU-27 with similar structure and scale of the production of farms. In this study, the emphasis is placed on highlighting the similarity of production structures typical of the climate’s areas of the EU-27 in the year 2008, and also on indicating the class in which the Polish agriculture were classified. For this research, the data from FADN database was used. This database contains weighted averages per individual farm in every of 27 UE member countries in 2008. The delimitation were made based on the structure of production, economic size, agricultural utilized area, production and income of agricultural farm. The research was conducted using the agglomeration hierarchic classification based on the Ward’s method. The structure of production is represented by 23 characteristics; the remaining characters are represented by single variables. The optimal number of classes of countries of similar structure and scale of production was estimated on the basis of the analysis of the amount of the intra-class variance’s increment. 10 classes of countries were obtained. These classes were described by the measure of the average differences for analyzed characters.

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