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Romania is one of the EU countries with significant agricultural potential. The economic and social changes occurring after 1990 has profoundly affected the agriculture in Romania. The excessive land fragmentation due to land restitution to the former owners and their heirs, as well as the subsequent developments have led to a large number of small-sized agricultural holdings and a small number of large agricultural holdings, in terms of size and economy. The sustainability performance must be assessed from the economic, social and environmental points of view. The paper aims to assess the sustainable performance of the agricultural holdings in Romania on economic size classes, to highlight the directions for enhancing the performance by reorganizing the agricultural structures. For achieving this purpose, we used the Sustainable Value-based approach. The results of comparison between Romania and other EU countries highlight the importance of medium-sized farms, which achieve the best performance expressed by the Sustainable Value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The efficiency registered by a country in the economic, social and ecological areas determines the growth pattern to achieve sustainable development. The contribution of each system component of sustainable development can be appreciated by various indicators. The main goal of this work is to present a possibility to evaluate the performance of new EU Member States related on the three important directions of sustainable development, using information from international databases. The paper used a Data Envelopment Analysis method for investigating the efficiency levels of sustainable development in the selected group of countries. These efficiency levels depend on each country's specific conditions in resources management. The application of the method led to obtaining an efficiency frontier, and the possibility of ranking the countries in accordance with their relative scores of sustainable performance. The results obtained highlight that Romania did not register enough efficiency in using its economic, social and ecological resources, since consistent possibilities to improve the sustainable performance existed. Some measures are identified for reducing the gaps between the Romanian economy and the other EU countries, which could lead to a better harmonization of the three sustainable development components and could increase their favourable effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]