Inefficient agricultures

In this post I will look at a very crude measure of productivity of the agriculture sector and compare it across a completely arbitrary sample of countries. What's the measure? Suppose that in a given country every full-time worker is equally productive; that is, every worker produces the same fraction of the country's GDP. Normalize that fraction to 1; that would be our benchmark. Then we look at what fraction of that benchmark is being produced by an average agricultural worker in each country. I looked at 32 countries: all European countries with population of over 4 million plus the U.S., Canada, Turkey, Australia and New Zealand. The bar chart is below the fold:

First observation: agriculture is inefficient. Average productivity is 0.65; there are only three countries with productivity exceeding 1: Croatia (1.2), Sweden (1.45), and the U.S. with a mind-boggling 2.0 (I have no idea what that's about). The least productive countries are Mexico (0.25), Poland (0.26), Romania (0.27), Portugal (0.28), Turkey (0.3) and Greece (0.3). It's slightly surprising to me that Polish agriculture is doing worse than those of some formerly communist countries that are markedly poorer (Belarus, Russia, or Ukraine).

The most inefficient agricultures have something in common: they're all big (meaning that they employ a very large share of the labor force; the unquestionable leaders here are Turkey, Romania and Serbia, in which countries about 30% of labor force works in agriculture). As the graph below shows, returns to labor in agriculture diminish exponentially:

So it seems that one part of the problem with Polish agriculture is that there are simply too many farmers in Poland. As to what the other parts of the problem are, I don't really know.

(Note: Data source is the CIA World Factbook. Graphs were made using R. As an R beginner, I hereby apologize to any serious R users who may be reading this for the incredible crudeness of my graphs.)