Efficiency of agriculture in European FADN regions Jozef Palkovič 1 Martina Uličná 2 Zlata Sojková 3 Abstract Competitiveness of the regions is an actual topic. Regional competitiveness in general is related to various spheres of regional activities. One of the most important factors, influencing especially rural regions, is agriculture. This is important not only for the food security at regional and national level, but also for development of regional environment and overall attractivity of region. On the other side the primary role of the agriculture is to ensure sufficient food supply with adequate quality. Path to developed agriculture is effective and efficient use of production factors. The main objective of presented paper is to compare European regions with regard to efficiency of their agriculture production. Analysis was based on the data provided by Farm Accountancy Data Network database (FADN). From the methodological point of view was used stochastic frontier analysis to estimate efficiency of each FADN region. For this purpose was used Cobb-Douglas and translog production function to estimate efficient production frontier. Quality of both functions was evaluated using Akaike information criterion (AIC) and Schwarz criterion (SBC). For the final analysis was used function with lower value of both criterions. Total output (SE131) was used as dependent variable. Explanatory variables used in the final model (inputs) were capital (SE 510) and labour (SE010) in logarithm form. Agricultural area was also taken into account, but this input was insignificant in all estimated models. This could be caused by different orientation of investigated farms. Some of them are oriented primary to crop production, and some to stockbreeding. Especially the second group´s efficiency is not influenced by agricultural area, which could cause this result. The least efficient regions were Malta, Asturias (Spain), Pohjois-Suomi (Finland), Lann i norra (Sweden), Slovenia, Canarias (Spain), Sisa-suomi (Finland), Limousin (France), Galicia (Spain), Etela-Suomi (Finland) with technical efficiency less than 0.69. The most efficient regions were: Calabria (Italy), Champagne-Ardenne (France), Ile de France (France), Liguria (Italy), Severoiztochen (Bulgaria), Alsace (France) with technical efficiency higher than 0.95. The average value of technical efficiency was 0.85. From the number of 135 FADN regions, 82 have performance over average and 53 under this value. In general, we can conclude that most efficient agriculture is in Italy, United Kingdom and France, least efficient were regions in North Europe, which is primarily caused by local weather conditions. Major part of inefficient regions were less favoured areas (e.g. regions of Finland), on the other side there were some areas where should be expected more efficient agriculture regard to its climate (Spain). Key words: Efficiency, agriculture production, FADN, stochastic frontier analysis 1,2,3 Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra, Faculty of economics and management, Department of Statistics and Operation Research Tr. Andreja Hlinku 2, Nitra, Slovakia 1 e-mail: jozef.palkovic@uniag.sk 2 e-mail: martina.ulicna@uniag.sk 3 e-mail: zlata.sojkova@uniag.sk