The social role of the farms is, especially, relevant in the rural areas where the socioeconomic problems are, often, more visible. In this perspective, this study aims to investigate the interrelationships of the labour input with other variables inside the farms and assess how the sector may create more employment in a sustainable way. For that, the labour input was, first, correlated with other farm variables and after analysed through factor analysis approaches and cross-section econometric methodologies, considering as basis the Cobb-Douglas and Verdoorn-Kaldor models. The main findings highlight relevant insights to improve the social dimension of the European Union farms. The labour input growth rate is positively influenced by the total output growth rates and negatively impacted by the total productivity growth. The effects from the investment and from the subsidies are residual or not significant.
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The agriculture played a central role in the societies of the previous centuries (Horrell et al., 2020). In the last century, the agricultural sector lost its relative importance (comparatively with other sectors) in the regional development (Alonso Villa & Juste Carrion, 2018), nonetheless maintains its relevance in many regions (Melchor-Ferrer, 2020) and on the socio-economic characteristics worldwide (Wilk et al., 2019), specifically for a more sustainable development (Baer-Nawrocka & Poczta, 2018).
The transformations in the societies and in the farming sector has freed labour to other sectors, regions and countries (Greenwood, 2008), solving, for example, problems of skilled labour shortage in the farms of some countries (Kvartiuk, 2015). Some of these transitions are needed to improve the economic performance (Herman, 2016). The agricultural dynamics follow, in general, the trends of the surrounding contexts (Meyfroidt et al., 2016). However, often remain maladjustments that require policy interventions (Poczta & Pawlak, 2011), namely in frameworks where the agriculture still maintains a significant importance for economic and social evolution (Wlodarczyk-Spiewak & Korpysa, 2006). In the transition processes the benchmark with other realities may bring positive insights (Zbarsky et al., 2020).