Attitudes of Macedonian Farmers towards EU accession

Abstract

Macedonia has been a candidate-country for EU membership since 2005. The EU integrative process, without doubt, will have an impact on the Macedonian economy and particularly on the agricultural sector. So far, the farmers’ attitude and intentions with regard to the EU integration and accession have not been thoroughly investigated. Respectively, the objective of the paper is to provide understanding of the Macedonian farmers’ attitude and behavioural intentions in the context of EU accession and the potential policy and market changes. Furthermore, another issue is to establish whether there are significant discrepancies among farmers and their attitude towards EU accession. The results revealed that the farmer community in the country is quite heterogeneous in terms of farm and farmers’ profiles and farm management practices. The cluster analysis suggests that there are four clusters according to which the variables explaining the attitudes were significantly different, provisionally labelled as “optimist “, “moderate”, “restrained” and “sceptic”.