Abstract:
The importance of innovation in agriculture is supported by the effects that innovation has on the growth of
the sector's performance in relation to its efforts. The aim of the paper is to identify and to analyse the
statistical association between the indicators of agricultural performance, regarding the economic,
environmental and innovative aspects at European Union level (EU-28). For this, a study on agriculture from
the 28 EU countries was developed using the information available in Eurostat statistics during 2006-2016.
To address the research problem, the association analysis and correlation analysis as data analysis methods
were used. The data were processed using the functions of IBM SPSS - Version 20. The analysis of the relations
between the three areas of agricultural performance, namely economic, environmental and innovative,
highlighted the following aspects: i) on average, there was an inverse relationship between economic
performance and the environmental one; ii) on average, attracting borrowed capital and increasing
indebtedness can enhance the innovative processes in agriculture; iii) the increase in economic performance was
positively correlated with the intensive use of agricultural land and high levels of investments in technology.
A rich economy has the financial resources to invest in research - development - innovation activities in the
agricultural sector, which stimulates the economic performance of farmers and others companies in the related
fields. The statistical survey highlighted the direct link between the general level of development of a country's
economy and the innovative capacity of the strategic sector represented by agriculture.
