Measuring agricultural sustainability of European countries with a focus on transportation

Abstract

Agriculture is one of the most important sectors for the development of countries. Furthermore, it can affect and be affected by climate change, especially since agricultural products are increasingly being transported to meet the demands of an increasing and urbanised population. Consequently, the measurement of agricultural sustainability should include transportation elements. The purpose of the current paper is to calculate the agricultural sustainability of European countries using a two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA). Different variations of the model are used to gain better insights into the overall agricultural performance. The results illustrate that Malta, Italy, the Netherlands and Denmark perform well compared to other European countries in both two-stage DEA variations that were used and the differences that are observed in the variations are attributed to the different number of constraints. Finally, a computational experiment is performed to investigate the phenomenon of rank reversal and a new index is proposed.