ABSTRACT
In Poland and Yugoslavia, the ownership and management of farms remains overwhelmingly in private hands; less than one-fourth of agricultural land in each country is in state and collective farms. In Hungary, the New Economic Policy, put into effect in agriculture after the 1961-1962 collectivization, has provided effective incentives to collective and individual farmers and decentralized management of collective farms. Until the mid-1960s, agriculture, measured in terms of its share in total employment and its share in the gross national product (GNP), was the largest economic sector in several of the East European countries. Both its employment and GNP shares, however, have been declining steadily in all countries during the entire postwar period, due to rapid industrialization. Eastern Europe as a whole has a little less than one-fourth of its labor in agriculture and generates over one-fifth of GNP in agriculture. Very large differences in productivity of labor continue to exist among the individual countries.
