Review of concepts for the evaluation of sustainable agriculture in Germany and comparison of measurement schemes for farm sustainability

Within the EU research project SVAPPAS, a method of sustainability measurement based on principles of financial markets, will be tested wrt sustainability issues in agriculture, and further developed. This analysis is oriented to farm level approach based on FADN data. The study goes in two directions; first, measurement concepts available in German are reviewed, and second, the different methods are applied to a sample of dairy farms selected from the national FADN. The results of DEA, Sustainable Value and economic indicators lead to similar conclusions in most assessments. In contrast to the high correlation between Sustainable Value and DEA, a rather low correlation with the ecological indicators can be observed. Moreover, results of SV and economic indicators are generally contrary to ecological indicators. In each case it seems to be reasonable to use more than one approach for the assessment, to get a more detailed and comprehensive picture of the individual dimensions and issues of sustainability. -- Im Rahmen des EU-Forschungsprojekts SVAPPAS wird die Anwendung einer Methode für Nachhaltigkeitsbewertung, basierend auf Prinzipien von Finanzmärkten (Sustainable Value (SV)), im Bereich der Landwirtschaft getestet und weiter entwickelt. Für die vorliegende Analyse werden Daten aus dem deutschen Testbetriebsnetz verwendet. Sie zielt darauf ab, verschiedene in Deutschland verfügbare und im Rahmen des Projektes weiter entwickelte Bewertungskonzepte am Beispiel von Milchvieh haltenden Betrieben anzuwenden und zu testen. Die Ergebnisse der Data Envelopment Analyse (DEA) und es SV-Ansatzes führen zu ähnlichen Bewertungen. Im Gegensatz zur hohen Korrelation zwischen SV und DEA kann eine ziemlich niedrige Korrelation mit den ökologischen Indikatoren beobachtet werden; zudem sind Ergebnisse von SV und ökologischen Indikatoren entgegengesetzt. Deshalb scheint es notwendig, mehrere Bewertungskonzepte zu verwenden, um ein umfassenderes Bild der einzelnen Dimensionen der Nachhaltigkeit zu bekommen.Sustainability,efficiency analysis,indicators,dairy farms,Nachhaltigkeit,Effizienzanalyse,Indikatoren,Milchviehbetriebe

Making asset investment decisions for wastewater systems that include sustainability

Effective integrated water management is a key component of the World Water Vision and the way in which aspirations for water equity may be realized. Part of the vision includes the promotion of sustainability of water systems and full accountability for their interaction with other urban systems. One major problem is that “sustainability” remains an elusive concept, although those involved with the provision of urban wastewater systems now recognize that decisions involving asset investment should use the “triple bottom line” approach to society, the economy, and the environment. The Sustainable Water Industry Asset Resource Decisions project has devised a flexible and adaptable framework of decision support processes that can be used to include the principles of sustainability more effectively. Decision mapping conducted at the outset of the project has shown that only a narrow range of criteria currently influence the outcome of asset investment decisions. This paper addresses the concepts of sustainability assessment and presents two case studies that illustrate how multicriteria decision support systems can enhance the assessment of the relative sustainability of a range of options when decisions are being made about wastewater asset investment

Real-Time Measurement of Business Conditions, Second Version

We construct a framework for measuring economic activity at high frequency, potentially in real time. We use a variety of stock and flow data observed at mixed frequencies (including very high frequencies), and we use a dynamic factor model that permits exact filtering. We illustrate the framework in a prototype empirical example and a simulation study calibrated to the example.Business cycle, Expansion, Recession, State space model, Macroeconomic forecasting, Dynamic factor model, Contraction, Turning point

Health inequalities in the older population: the role of personal capital, social resources and socio-economic circumstances.

Older people now constitute the majority of those with health problems in developed countries so an understanding of health variations in later life is increasingly important. In this paper, we use data from three rounds of the Health Survey for England, a large nationally representative sample, to analyse variations in the health of adults aged 65-84 by indicators of attributes acquired in childhood and young adulthood, termed personal capital; and by current social resources and current socio-economic circumstances, while controlling for smoking behaviour and age. We used six indicators of health status in the analysis, four based on self-reports and two based on nurse collected data, which we hypothesised would identify different dimensions of health. Results showed that socio-economic indicators, particularly receipt of income support (a marker of poverty) were most consistently associated with raised odds of poor health outcomes. Associations between marital status and health were in some cases not in the expected direction. This may reflect bias arising from exclusion of the institutional population (although among those under 85 the proportion in institutions is very low) but merits further investigation, especially as the marital status composition of the older population is changing. Analysis of deviance showed that social resources (marital status and social support) had the greatest effect on the indicator of psychological health (GHQ) and also contributed significantly to variation in self-rated health, but among women not to variation in taking three or more medicines and among men not to self-reported long-standing illnesses. Smoking, in contrast, was much more strongly associated with these indicators than with self-rated health. These results are consistent with the view that self-rated health may provide a holistic indicator of health in the sense of well-being, whereas measures such as taking prescribed medications may be more indicative of specific morbidities. The results emphasise again the need to consider both socio-economic and socio-psychological influences on later life health

Reading the story of law and embeddedness through a community lens: A Polanyi-meets-Cotterrell economic sociology of law?

In this article I propose that the role of law in Karl Polanyi’s concept of the “always embedded economy”1 can be enriched by the application of the “lens of community”2developed by Roger Cotterrell.3I begin with Polanyi’s suggestion that economic action and interaction are always “embedded” in wider social life. Reading through the lens of community, we can be more specific: any actor is at once engaged, to different degrees (from fleeting to stable), in multiple types (whether focusing on instrumental, traditional, affective and/or belief-based action) of social life. I then explore a second, implicit, cornerstone of Polanyi’s argument: that analytical and normative approaches to economy may become disembedded from wider social life. Reading through the lens of community we can again be more specific: in the transformation to a market society, the analytical and normative approaches that are central to economic actions and interactions are confused with, and privileged over, those that are central to non-economic actions and interactions. This confusion and privileging can have what we might call a performative effect on action and interaction. Finally, I explore Polanyi’s story of law as a facilitator both of disembedding movements and of re-embedding counter- movements. The application of a law-and-community lens suggests some additional details of that storyline and that there are additional plotlines to be pursued. The practical potential of this Polanyi-meets-Cotterrell economic sociology of law is briefly illustrated with references to two twenty-first-century cautionary tales: the World Bank’s investment climate programme and the 2008 financial crisis

Weights in multidimensional indices of well-being: an overview

Multidimensional indices are becoming increasingly important instruments to assess the well-being of societies. They move beyond the focus on a single indicator and yet, are easy to present and communicate. A crucial step in the construction of a multidimensional index of well-being is the selection of the relative weights for the different dimensions. The aim of this paper is to study the role of these weights and to critically survey eight different approaches to set them. We categorize the approaches in three classes: data-driven, normative and hybrid weighting, and compare their respective advantages and drawbacks.composite indicator, multidimensional well-being index, weights.

Determinants of the international influence of a R&D organisation: a bibliometric approach

Traditionally, studies on the influence and impact of knowledge-producing organisations have been addressed by means of strict economic analysis, stressing their economic impact to a local, regional or national extent. In the present study, an alternative methodology is put forward in order to evaluate the international scientific impact and influence of a knowledge-producing and -diffusing institution. We introduce a new methodology, based on scientometric and bibliometric tools, which complement traditional assessments by considering the influence of a R&D institution when looking at the scientific production undertaken and the recognition of its relevance by its international peer community. Focusing on the most prolific scientific areas of INESC Porto, and resorting to published scientific work recorded in the Science Citation Index (SCI), we show that INESC Porto has enlarged its international scientific network. The logit estimations demonstrate that the wide geographical influence of INESC Porto scientific research is a result not of its international positioning in terms of co-authorships, but rather a result of the quality of its scientific output.Impact and influence assessment methods; R&D Institutions; Bibliometrics, Scientometrics; knowledge network; INESC Porto