Exploring the statistical association between the economic, environmental and innovative areas of performance: The case of European Union agriculture

Abstract

The importance of innovation in agriculture is supported by the effects that innovation has on the growth of the sector's performance in relation to its efforts. The aim of the paper is to identify and to analyse the statistical association between the indicators of agricultural performance, regarding the economic, environmental and innovative aspects at European Union level (EU-28). For this, a study on agriculture from the 28 EU countries was developed using the information available in Eurostat statistics during 2006-2016. To address the research problem, the association analysis and correlation analysis as data analysis methods were used. The data were processed using the functions of IBM SPSS - Version 20. The analysis of the relations between the three areas of agricultural performance, namely economic, environmental and innovative, highlighted the following aspects: i) on average, there was an inverse relationship between economic performance and the environmental one; ii) on average, attracting borrowed capital and increasing indebtedness can enhance the innovative processes in agriculture; iii) the increase in economic performance was positively correlated with the intensive use of agricultural land and high levels of investments in technology. A rich economy has the financial resources to invest in research - development - innovation activities in the agricultural sector, which stimulates the economic performance of farmers and others companies in the related fields. The statistical survey highlighted the direct link between the general level of development of a country's economy and the innovative capacity of the strategic sector represented by agriculture.