ABSTRACT
Until the Second World War agriculture constituted Hungary’s largest economic sector, and structural transformation from an agricultural to an industrial country proceeded slowly. Starting at the end of the 1870s, it took nearly a century for agriculture’s proportion of national product to fall from around 75 per cent to just below 20 per cent in 1970/4 (Table 11.1). During the seven decades of c. 1895-1965, Hungary’s structural transformation proceeded under the condition of poor agricultural growth or stagnation. In addition, industry was not able to compensate for the poor performance of agriculture
Table 11.1 Structural change, 1870-1980.
