The Competitiveness of Hungarian Food Industry [antikvár]

1. Introduction The economic analysis of Hungarian food industry (Table 1) provides a good possibility to study the problems of transition, globalisation and European integration of Hungarian economy, because this is one of the biggest and most open to other sectors of the Hungarian industry. The food industry has three important missions in the Hungarian national economy: - this sector plays a determining role in the fulfilment of domestic demand; - the share of Hungarian agribusiness in the Hungarian foreign export - as a consequence of rapid development of export of other sectors - shows a declining tendency (Fig. 1), but the efficiency and the value-added content of domestic origin of food export is higher than in most parts of Hungarian economy (Szabó, 1998), that's why the food export is of vital importance from the viewpoint of the external balance of the national economy; - the majority of agricultural products is processed in the food-industrial sphere, so the competitiveness of food industry is an important factor for rural development and employment, too. The place and role of food processing in rural development is shown in Fig. 2. Unlike the rest of the national economy during the years of "neither plan - nor market" period of development Kornai (1980) of the market economy Hungarian agriculture and food industry achieved some important, profound results towards market-