Ranking farms with a composite indicator of sustainability
The assessment of sustainability at farm level has been growing in popularity over the last years. This paper contributes to this line of research by building up composite indicators for different facets –social, economic, environmental and global– of farm sustainability using a methodological approach that combines Data Envelopment Analysis and Multi Criteria Decision Methods. This approach is applied to a database of 163 farms located in the Spanish Northern Plateau. Our findings show that both economic and environmental sustainability indicators are positively correlated, but that this is not the case for the social indicator. We also check the influence of a set of variables on farm sustainability using bootstrapping techniques, and showing that increasing farm size, membership on agricultural cooperatives and farmers’ medium and upper agricultural-specific technical education all exert a significant positive influence on sustainability. These results provide clues for policy-makers that intend to design sustainability-increasing structural agricultural policies.
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| Length: | 46 pages |
| Date of creation: | Nov 2010 |
| Date of revision: | |
| Handle: | RePEc:eec:wpaper:1005 |
| Contact details of provider: | Postal: Phone: 963 82 83 49 Fax: 963 82 83 54 Web page: http://www.estructuraeconomica.esEmail: More information through EDIRC
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References listed on IDEAS
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- Latacz-Lohmann, Uwe & Hodge, Ian D., 2003.
"European agri-environmental policy for the 21st century,"
Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics,
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- Uwe Latacz-Lohmann & Ian Hodge, 2003. "European agri-environmental policy for the 21st century," Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, vol. 47(1), pages 123-139, 03.
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- André, Francisco J. & Herrero, Inés & Riesgo, Laura, 2010. "A modified DEA model to estimate the importance of objectives with an application to agricultural economics," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 38(5), pages 371-382, October.
- Andr�s J Picazo-Tadeo & Andr�s Garc�a-Reche, 2007. "What makes environmental performance differ between firms? Empirical evidence from the Spanish tile industry," Environment and Planning A, Pion Ltd, London, vol. 39(9), pages 2232-2247, September.
- Van Passel, Steven & Nevens, Frank & Mathijs, Erik & Van Huylenbroeck, Guido, 2007. "Measuring farm sustainability and explaining differences in sustainable efficiency," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 62(1), pages 149-161, April.
- Gómez-Limón, José A. & Sanchez-Fernandez, Gabriela, 2010. "Empirical evaluation of agricultural sustainability using composite indicators," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 69(5), pages 1062-1075, March.
- Bohringer, Christoph & Jochem, Patrick E.P., 2007. "Measuring the immeasurable -- A survey of sustainability indices," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 63(1), pages 1-8, June.
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