Assessment of agricultural sustainability in European Union countries: a group-based multivariate trajectory approach

Abstract Sustainability of agriculture is difficult to measure and assess because it is a multidimensional concept that involves economic, social and environmental aspects and is subjected to temporal evolution and geographical differences. Existing studies assessing agricultural sustainability in the European Union (EU) are affected by several shortcomings that limit their relevance for policy makers. Specifically, most of them focus on farm level or cover a small set of countries, and the few exceptions covering a broad set of countries consider only a subset of the sustainable dimensions or rely on cross-sectional data. In this paper, we consider yearly data on 12 indicators (5 for the economic, 3 for the social and 4 for the environmental dimension) measured on 26 EU countries in the period 2004–2018 (15 years), and apply group-based multivariate trajectory modeling to identify groups of countries with common trends of sustainable objectives. An expectation-maximization algorithm is proposed to perform maximum likelihood estimation from incomplete data without relying on an explicit imputation procedure. Our results highlight three groups of countries with distinguished strong and weak sustainable objectives. Strong objectives common to all the three groups include improvement of productivity, increase of personal income in rural areas, reduction of poverty in rural areas, increase of production of renewable energy, rise of organic farming and reduction of nitrogen balance. Instead, enhancement of manager turnover and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions are weak objectives common to all the three groups of countries. Our findings represent a valuable resource to formulate new schemes for the attribution of subsidies within the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).