1886. Navigating the Green Frontier: A Comparative Analysis of Agri-Food Sustainability between the UK and Europe
Invited abstract in session TD-60: DEA applications in Environment and Sustainability I, stream Data Envelopment Analysis and its applications.
Tuesday, 14:30-16:00Room: Western LT
Authors (first author is the speaker)
| 1. | Behrouz Arabi
|
| School for Business and Society, University of York | |
| 2. | Sonal Choudhary
|
| School for Business and Society, University of York | |
| 3. | Mehdi Toloo
|
| Department of Business Analytics & Operations, University of Surrey |
Abstract
Sustainability in agri-food production presents a significant challenge, particularly in balancing economic productivity with environmental stewardship amid climate change, economic volatility, and geopolitical instability. Assessing sustainability requires incorporating multiple input, output, and undesirable output factors into the models. This research introduces a sophisticated weight-restricted Directional Distance Function (DDF) model, designed to integrate undesirable outputs within a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) framework to evaluate and compare the sustainability performance of agri-food production systems in the UK and selected European nations. Conventional DEA, including DDF models, often encounter infeasibility issues when incorporating weight restrictions. To address this, we propose a novel methodological approach that integrates an enhanced Analytic Hierarchy Process (eAHP)-derived weights into DDF models, providing a more precise representation of the trade-offs between economic outcomes, resource inputs, and environmental impacts in measuring agri-food sustainability at the national level. Our empirical research spans the years 2010 to 2021 and assesses sustainability performance using a comprehensive dataset that includes key economic, social, and environmental factors. The findings highlight significant variations in sustainability performance across nations.
Keywords
- Data Envelopment Analysis
- Sustainable Development
- OR in Agriculture
Status: accepted
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