Objective: To investigate the sociodemographic determinants of diet quality of the elderly in four EU countries. Design: Cross-sectional study. For each country, a regression was performed of a multidimensional index of dietary quality v. sociodemographic variables. Setting: In Finland, Finnish Household Budget Survey (1998 and; in Sweden, SNAC-K (2001SNAC-K ( -2004; in the UK, Expenditure & Food Survey (2006-07); in Italy, Multi-purpose Survey of Daily Life (2009). Subjects: One-and two-person households of over-50s (Finland, n 2994; UK, n 4749); over-50 s living alone or in two-person households (Italy, n 7564); over-60 s (Sweden, n 2023).Results: Diet quality among the EU elderly is both low on average and heterogeneous across individuals. The regression models explained a small but significant part of the observed heterogeneity in diet quality. Resource availability was associated with diet quality either negatively (Finland and UK) or in a non-linear or nonstatistically significant manner (Italy and Sweden), as was the preference for food parameter. Education, not living alone and female gender were characteristics positively associated with diet quality with consistency across the four countries, unlike socio-professional status, age and seasonality. Regional differences within countries persisted even after controlling for the other sociodemographic variables. Conclusions: Poor dietary choices among the EU elderly were not caused by insufficient resources and informational measures could be successful in promoting healthy eating for healthy ageing. On the other hand, food habits appeared largely set in the latter part of life, with age and retirement having little influence on the healthiness of dietary choices. KeywordsElderly Ageing Diet quality Socio-economic Sociodemographic Healthy eating Nutritional healthIt is now well established that the EU population is ageing, which creates important challenges for the functioning of public services and raises fundamental questions about the evolution of human welfare. A few figures help appreciate the magnitude and speed of the changes ahead. Eurostat forecasts that the proportion of the EU population over the age of 65 years (80 years) will increase steadily from 16?0 % (4?1 %) in 2010 to 27?8 % (10?1 %) in 2050 (1) . Meanwhile, the demographic projections of the ANCIEN project of the EU Seventh Framework Programme suggest that life expectancy at age 65 years will increase by about 3 years from 2008 to 2040 (2)

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Sustainability is a multidimensional concept that entails economic, environmental, and social aspects. The sustainable value (SV) method is one of the most promising attempts to quantify sustainability performance of firms. SV compares performance of a firm to a benchmark, which must be estimated in one way or another. This paper examines alternative parametric and nonparametric methods for estimating the benchmark technology from empirical data. Reviewed methods are applied to an empirical data of 332 Finnish dairy farms. The application reveals four interesting conclusions. First, the greater flexibility of the nonparametric methods is evident from the better empirical fit. Second, negative skewness of the regression residuals of both parametric OLS and nonparametric CNLS speaks against the average-practice benchmark technology in this application. Third, high positive correlations across a wide spectrum of methods suggest that the findings are relatively robust. Forth, the stochastic decomposition of the disturbance term to filter out the noise component from the inefficiency term yields more realistic efficiency estimates and performance targets.;