Quantitative relationships between investments in farms and environmental effects in some European countries

Abstract

Since the early 1970s, in many European Union member countries, there has been a significant improvement in their own agricultural economic growth due to the Common Agricultural Policy. The increasing levels of investment in land and in machinery have been one of the pivotal pillars in improvement levels of food self-sufficiency. However, a growth in investments has increased pollutant emission in terms of carbon dioxide, nitrogenous compounds and a deterioration of an environment. The purpose of this paper was to investigate the impact of investments on agricultural and arable land in improving agricultural production towards environmental quality. The quantitative methods have used a neural relation analysis through the Kohonen's maps or self-organizing maps (SOMs). Findings of Kohonen's maps have pointed out a good ability to classify the time series data and the spatial evolution of data over the time; furthermore, SOMs have been useful in describing the impact of investment on production specialization, levels of pollution and food self-sufficiency in the European countries. To sum up, an improvement of food self-sufficient levels has been tightly linked to an increase of pollution in terms of carbon dioxide emissions.

A Quantitative Assessment of the Rurality and an Efficiency Analysis of Emigration in Romania

“…In general, comparing different Romanian NUTS II counties, the district of Bucharest-Ilfov emerges as having suffered less socio-economic marginalisation and territorial disparities than Eastern and Southern regions (SURD et al, 2011). This implies a different impact of the financial supports allocated by the European Union before and after the enlargement in 2007, corroborating the hypothesis according to which the poorer a rural area is, the more modest its development will be (GALLUZZO, 2017a;2017b;2018a;2018b;SURD et al, 2011). Therefore, the focus of the National Rural Development Plan on stimulating measures of diversification in farming through agritourism, rural tourism, and the EU's LEADER initiatives, which is financed under the second pillar of the Common Agricultural Policy, represents a good opportunity for rural areas to reduce the socio-economic marginalisation suffered in many deprived contexts, even if the level of GDP per capita remains one of the most significant factors in the mitigation of socio-economic disparities and improving the environmental protection and sustainability of rural territories (BURJA & BURJA, 2014;GALLUZZO, 2017a;2017c;IORIO & CORSALE, 2010;ABRHAM, 2011).…”

“…In the multiple regression model, the basic assumptions were (VERBEEK, 2006;GALLUZZO, 2017a;2017b): the statistical error €i has null conditional mean given X i , that is E(ε i |X i ) = 0; (X i , Y i ), i = 1, ...., n are extracted independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) from their joined distribution; (X i , ε i ) have finite fourth moments which are not zero.…”