Multiple outcome analysis of European agriculture in 2000-2016: A latent class multivariate trajectory approach

The consideration of the environmental and social dimensions, besides the economic one, is of great importance to highlight both development and sustainability objectives in the evaluation of the agricultural sector. However, multiple outcomes analysis is challenging due to not only methodological issues, but alsoquality and availability of time series data. In this paper, we propose a latent class multivariate trajectory model, which is applied to 31 European countries by considering a set of economic, environmental and social indicators in the period 2000-2016. The results support the effectiveness of our approach by clearly identifying four groups of countries with emblematic characteristics of the agricultural systems: mature and sustainable, mature but with weak social sustainability, developing withand without clear sustainable objectives.