Productivity Indicators of Agriculture and Tourism in Zala and Somogy Counties

Hollósy, Zsolt – Bacsi, Zsuzsanna

Keywords: industry characteristics, firm size, firm efficiency, panel regression JEL: Q12, Q54, Z30

The paper compares the performance of firms operating in the agricultural sector and in the tourism sector in two counties of Hungary, comparing the performance of 2613 firms for a period of 16 years (2004-2019). The data are from tax reports of all companies of the analysed areas that operated in 2019 regardless of the year of their foundation. As agriculture and rural tourism heavily rely on environmental conditions, they are more seriously impacted by any environmental events than other production or service industries. The research focused on identifying differences between the two industries and time patterns together with size-related traits of company performance. The analysed indicators were labour force, sales revenues, total assets, labour productivity, and total factor productivity (TFP), using descriptive statistics and panel regression analysis. Our results shows that the performance of firms in tourism and in agriculture differ significantly in total assets, sales revenues, labour force, labour productivity, but does not differ in TFP; while differences are associated either with average levels of indicator values or their temporal tendencies. Our results also show that firm performance significantly differs by firm size, with smaller firms being generally more labour-efficient than larger ones. Labour efficiency is found to be positively affected by total asset level, but TFP is not. Contrary to the general assumptions, agriculture is found to be not less efficient than tourism.