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Malta

Economic accounts for agriculture (aact)

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National Reference Metadata in Single Integrated Metadata Structure (SIMS)

Compiling agency: [MT1] National Statistics Office (NSO) (Malta)

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The Economic Accounts for Agriculture (EAA) provide an overview of the agricultural activities in a systematic and comparable way to serve as basis for analyses, forecasts and political measures. The methodology is laid down in Annex I of the Regulation (EC) 138/2004 of the European Parliament and of the Council. The EAA methodological manual provides further details and clarifications (LINK).

24 June 2026

The EAA are a satellite account of the ESA providing complementary information and concepts adapted to the particular nature of the agricultural industry.
The EAA are shown as a sequence of inter-related accounts. As the EAA are based on the industry concept, the sequence of accounts is limited to the first accounts of the current accounts:

  • the production account (its balancing item: value added)
  • the generation-of-income account (its balancing item: operating surplus).

Nevertheless EAA contains other accounts (of the ESA) at least partly:

  • the entrepreneurial income account (one of the current accounts) and
  • the capital account (one of the accumulation accounts).


The EAA provide a wide range of indicators on the economic activities of the agricultural sector: these include output, intermediate consumption, gross and net value added, gross fixed capital formation (GFCF), both at current prices and at reference year prices, as well as compensation of employees, other taxes and subsidies on production, net operating surplus or net mixed income, property income and net entrepreneurial income at current prices. (see for more details points 1.40-1.48 in Annex I of Regulation (EC) 138/2004.)

Three income indicators are defined in the EAA:

  • Index of the real income of factors in agriculture per annual work unit (indicator A).
  • Index of real net agricultural entrepreneurial income per unpaid annual work unit (indicator B).
  • Net entrepreneurial income of agriculture (indicator C).

See for more details chapter 5 in Annex I of Regulation (EC) 138/2004.

The statistical unit is the local kind of activity unit.

In order to provide more detailed information and to analyse flows generated by the production process and the use of goods and services, it is necessary to select units which emphasise relationships of a technical-economic kind. This means that, institutional units are broken-down into smaller and more homogeneous units with regard to the kind of production (local kind-of-activity units/local KAUs) (ESA 2010, 2.147).
The local KAU is defined as the part of a KAU which corresponds to a local unit. The institutional unit's information system is capable of indicating or calculating for each local KAU at least the value of output, intermediate consumption, compensation of employees, the operating surplus and employment and gross fixed capital formation (ESA 2010, 2.148).
The agricultural holding, is the local KAU most appropriate to the agricultural industry. However, the variety of agricultural activities that can be performed on agricultural holdings makes them a special type of local KAU. The strict application of the ESA rule to units and their group should in fact result in a division of the agricultural holding into several separate local KAUs in cases where several activities of the NACE Rev. 2 four-digit class are performed on the same holding and the information required according to the explanations above is available. The adoption of the agricultural holding as the local KAU of the agricultural industry in the national accounts (NA) and EAA is based on a statistical approach.
The speciality and the aim of EAA is to cover all agricultural activity carried out by an agricultural holding or any other local KAU not having agriculture as its main activity.

The use of the local KAU as the basic unit for the agricultural industry entails recording non-agricultural secondary activities where they cannot be distinguished from the main agricultural activity (inseparable non-agricultural secondary activities of local agricultural KAUs). The selection criterion for inseparable non-agricultural secondary activities is rather the type of activity than the nature of the product. For example, agro-tourism services provided by a farm are only included if they cannot be separated from its agricultural activities.

The agricultural industry includes all local KAUs at local level which perform the economic activities, as principal or secondary activity corresponds to Division 01 in NACE Rev. 2 (cf. 1.60 to 1.66 of EAA Reg.)

The entire territory of the country.

2023 calendar year.

To describe accuracy, the country uses the quality and performance indicator called ‘data revision – average absolute size’ under point 17.2.1 of this document. 

EAA data at current prices and at prices for the preceding year are given in millions of units of national currency.

Agricultural labour input data are given in thousand annual work units (AWU).

See the sub sections

Please see Annex 1.

Annexes:
Annex 1

Data is disseminated on an annual basis.

The data for reference year n is normally available and published and transmitted to Eurostat by n+9 months

The results of EAA are comparable between regions and countries.

There have been some changes but not enough to warrant the designation of a break in series