Project
Economic and Environmental Efficiency of Irish and EU agriculture
The EU Green Deal and related Farm to Fork Strategy will shape the future policy landscape for European agriculture. While the focus remains on increasing farm incomes and production, the environmental impact of agricultural practices has become another priority. Given this context, this project aims at integrating various environmental indicators in efficiency and productivity analysis for EU agriculture
Recent research on efficiency and productivity has incorporated environmental criteria alongside traditional economic measures. Kaiser et al. (2020) extended the conventional Total Factor Productivity index for Irish agriculture with nitrogen surplus as a single undesirable output. However, there is scope to extend this range of environmental variables, e.g., phosphorus and carbon dioxide, in efficiency and productivity analysis. The existing eco-efficiency literature emphasizes the need to understand the drivers of eco-efficiency (Läpple and Thorne, 2019; Martinez Cillero et al., 2018).
Examples of eco-efficiency drivers include policies (Cuadros‐Casanova et al., 2023; Kazukauskas et al., 2014; Khafagy and Vigani, 2022) and innovation (Heredero et al., 2020; Läpple and Thorne, 2019). However, empirical assessments of these drivers remain scarce.
Moreover, previous studies examined innovation and policy as the drivers of technical efficiency rather than eco-efficiency. A further criticism of recent literature on eco-efficiency is its concentration on single-country analysis. Comparative studies on eco-efficiency among farms across countries over an extended period are limited. Therefore, this project aims to measure environmental efficiency and productivity, including several environmental performance indicators, while addressing questions about how policy and innovations impact eco-efficiency performance among farms across EU over time.