We have analyzed these changes by assuming that the technical relationship in 1989 between the number of persons employed and the amount of labor required would apply in 1994. This implies no change in technology between the two years and indicates what 1994 employment would have been under that condition .The difference between that theoretical employment level and the actual 1989 level is 257,531 persons and would have been the employment lost due to reduced output if technology had not changed. However, the actual drop in employment was 104,893 persons and this means that technology changed toward a higher rate of labor utilization and that persons were employed, on average, for fewer days per year. This change offset part of the loss caused by lower output and increased employment by 152,638 persons beyond what it would have been. Thus as technology returns to or beyond its 1989 level, we would expect that employment would be reduced by at least 153,000 persons, or 22 percent of 1994 employment. The need then would be to expand agricultural production sufficiently to absorb these displaced workers, in addition to those displaced by lower production. This implies an output growth of approximately 50 percent.We have also examined the possibilities that agriculture can re-absorb this surplus labor by projecting labor requirements based on increasing yields from all crops . One may notice that even a doubling of yields will increase labor requirements by only by 35.6 percent. This would increase average man days worked per year to slightly above the level of 1989 but still below full-time employment.
The assumption of doubling yields seems unreasonable,black plastic plant pots bulk at least in the short term, and is not viewed as a likely remedy to under employment. Product mix changes are more likely to increase the total amount of labor used in agriculture. The shift away from labor intensive crops between 1989 and 1994 contributed to the employment problem. The areas devoted to oriental tobacco dropped by two-thirds, to Virginia tobacco by one-half and to sugar beets by four fifths. Perhaps only potatoes increased in area. Thus labor requirements were cut during the period and, in the same way, they could be expanded in the future if cropping returned toward former patterns. For example, if we were able to replace 200,000 decares of barley with oriental tobacco, labor requirements would increase by 15.91%. However, this shift is unlikely because barley and tobacco growing areas are not directly sub-stitutable. A more likely shift would be from potatoes iRstead of barley, and this would augment labor requirement by just about 10 percent. Consequently, a feasible shift toward more labor intensive crops would help in absorbing surplus labor but would not resolve the employment problem.A survey of agricultural production and labor uses was carried out in ten villages selected from the ten administrative regions of Bulgaria during the Summer of 1995. The survey design was based on experience gained in a pilot study conducted earlier in a representative village. Survey questions were grouped in four types of questionnaires. Questionnaire A sought general information about the village: population, employment, principal agricultural activities and main agricultural products. This information was taken from the mayors’ offices.
Questionnaires Band C were destined respectively for the former collective farms and new cooperatives. Questionnaire D was used for obtaining information from the households. Questions, asked in the last three types of questionnaires were about the crop and livestock production, cultivated area, and labor input.The survey data reflected national trends in many respects thus indicating that inferences drawn from the survey might reasonably be applied at the national level. Cropping patterns from the survey are similar to the national pattern with the survey having a slightly lower share of field crops and slightly larger share of fruits and vegetables. The differences are within 2 percentage points. Village data on agricultural employment follows a similar trend to national data. The drop in agricultural employment between 1989 and 1994 was 14.3% in the surveyed villages and 13.3% nationally. The average yields from the survey correspond to those from the national statistics, except for orchard crops. The survey shows an increase of the cultivated land, as does the national data. Both survey data and national statistics show a similar drop in non-agricultural employment levels. Survey results showed the area devoted to crops to be larger in 1994 but average yields were down. Orchards yields were higher than national averages because the coefficients used for transforming output per tree, the information collected in the survey, into output per decare, needed to apply normative labor requirements, are not precise enough. Trees on household plots tended to be larger than those in the orchards of former collective farms, and they yielded more fruit per tree. The standard coefficient estimated the number of trees equivalent to one decare based on large orchard plantings. Thus the number of household trees, when aggregated to the equivalent number of decares, produced a greater yield per decare than did the cooperative orchards. The survey indicated an increase in the number of the goats and the chickens, and a sharp decline for cattle, pigs, and sheep. This is exactly the same trend evident at the national level.
Survey results reveal some important changes not apparent in national data. These include the understatement of rural population, the increased role of private plotsS in absorbing additional labor, the magnitude of the shift from full time to part time labor, the significance on non-agricultural employment in rural areas. Tables 5, 6 and 7 summarize important data from survey questions.Village population data are important because they give a sense of the total labor pool and its character. There is a discrepancy between the population data provided by the mayors’ offices and that summarized from household interviews. The official data show more, persons registered in the village in 1989 than were reported in the household survey. However, in 1994, the household population was greater than that reported in official records. The number of people in surveyed households increased 22.5% while village population statistics show a decline of 15.1%. We believe that official population figures for the villages may have been overstated in 1989 because outside job opportunities attracted registered persons away from the village so they were not physically present to provide labor. The reverse appeared to be true in 1994 when outside job opportunities were curtailed and the cultivation of private plots became important for economic reasons and land was more available. A detailed examination of the primary data for each village showed that when answering the questionnaire,procona system heads of the households were likely to include some family members that were not living in the village but were working on the private plots during weekends and other personal time periods. Similarly the householders did not include people living in the village but working elsewhere and not contributing to the household plot.Survey results show that the labor surplus increased between 1989 and 1994, just as found in the national data, but that it became far more significant for cooperatives and less significant for households. Thus, the private plots were able to absorb some of the labor made available from immigration and from a decline in employment by cooperatives and non-agricultural enterprises. The area of and production from private plots increased and more household labor was required to support the increase. This caused the surplus of household labor to decline from 50 percent to 37 percent, close to the surplus level of the cooperatives. The intensity of labor use in the former collective farms and new coops began to converge and became within 10 percent of one another by 1994. With the increase in household labor supply, the number of days worked per person dropped from an average of 158 days in 1989 to an average of 108 days in 1994. Of these amounts, 48 days were allocated to private plots in 1989 and 55 days in 1994 resulting, at least in part, from the decrease in farming services provided by former cooperatives and the increase in average plot size. The large decline in the non-agricultural sector has caused more people of working age to supply added labor to the private plots and their share of this labor has risen from 34 percent to 40 percent. Although pensioners increased their labor input, their share declined from 64 percent to 59 percent, mainly because of the expansion of the labor supplied by people of working age. This expansion was insufficient to offset the severe contraction of employment by coops and non-agricultural activities.There was a substantial shift from full-time to part-time work. Cooperatives reported that full-time jobs dropped 40.3% and part-time jobs gained by 56.2%. Part-time employment increased its share of total employment in cooperatives from 25.88% to 53.2%, and its FTE frOItl 11.47% to 25.4%.
The number of people with full-time agricultural jobs declined from 1,687 to 1,013, and the number of people with part-time work increased from 542 to 1,050. These data show that the surplus labor in rural areas has increased not so much from job losses as from a decrease in the amount of time worked.Job losses in non-agricultural enterprises accounted for 88 percent of the employment decline recorded in the surveyed villages. Only 12 percent of the loss was attributed to agricultural production. This experience in rural areas is surprisingly close to the national situation where non-agricultural job losses accounted for 91 percent of the decline in employment. The share of non-agricultural employment reported by surveyed villages was 68 percent in 1989 and 55 percent in 1994. Household data support the importance of non-agricultural employment but not at the same high share. They indicate that non-agricultural activity accounted for 60% of the FTEs lost between 1989 and 1994. The details of the village data indicate that the employment of village persons in village agricultural enterprises changed very little. The job loss in village agriculture for village residents was reported to be 18 jobs or 1%. The major changes were in non-agricultural employment and employment in agriculture and non-agriculture outside of the village, and in the employment in the village of outsiders. It is clear from these results that non-agricultural employment in rural areas is at least as important, if not more important, than that in agriculture and that non-agricultural job losses are the major cause of unemployment and under-employment in rural areas. Policy remedies, therefore, must focus mostly on non-agricultural activities as a means for addressing this situation.The data from the survey of villages and from the analysis of national statistics reveal some important conclusions. It has declined at a slower rate than some other countries in the course of agricultural modernization. The decline in non-agricultural employment in rural villages has been much more severe. Concurrent with these changes has been a marked increase in the amount of part-time work. The average number of days worked per household has dropped significantly, as revealed by the household survey, and confirmed by cooperative employment data. As the result of these changes, real per capita income of village residents declined by one-third from 2,411 leva annually to 1,626 leva. Without the income gained from expanded production on private plots, the situation would have been worse. This suggests that there is an important income problem, rather than an employment problem .The differential between agricultural and industrial wages should have accelerated the employment outflow from agriculture and slowed it in industry6. However, numerous economic and policy factors intervened to prevent labor flows from following the path of relative wage rates. Thus rural communities had to contend with unemployed persons and employed persons earning very low salaries. This is consistent with the experience in other transition economies where at least 50% of the poor have jobs; and in some countries up to two-thirds of the poor are employed . This situation of unemployment and poverty creates high social costs and the need for important investments in education, training and retraining .Agricultural employment, that is the number of people receiving wages or income from farming, declined at an average annual rate of 2.8 percent between 1989 and 1994. This rate is equal to that of Portugal and higher than that experienced in Greece during the first decade of its integration into the European Union. However, it is far below the rate achieved by Spain as it redirected emphasis from agriculture toward the industrial and service sectors.