Ranking farms with a composite indicator of sustainability

Ernest Reig-Martínez (), José A. Gómez-Limón and Andres Picazo-Tadeo
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José A. Gómez-Limón: Instituto Andaluz de Investigación y Formación Agraria y Pesquera. Dpto. Economía Agraria. Córdoba.

No 1005, Working Papers from Department of Applied Economics II, Universidad de Valencia

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Sustainability index; Agriculture; Data Envelopment Analysis; Multi-Criteria Decision Making; Spain (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 D60 H41 Q10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2010-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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http://repecsrv.uv.es/paper/RePEc/pdf/eec_1005.pdf First version, 2010 (application/pdf)

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Journal Article: Ranking farms with a composite indicator of sustainability (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eec:wpaper:1005

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