Alfons Oude Lansink

Wageningen University & Research | WUR · Business Economics Group

Historical data on food safety monitoring often serve as an information source in designing monitoring plans. However, such data are often unbalanced: a small fraction of the dataset refers to food safety hazards that are present in high concentrations (representing commodity batches with a high risk of being contaminated, the positives) and a high...

This paper accounts for spatial effects by benchmarking farms against their k-nearest neighbours (KNN) and measuring their inefficiency in a non-parametric dynamic by-production setting. The optimal number of neighbours k against which farms are compared corresponds to the value of k that maximises the Moran I test for spatial autocorrelation of th...

Efficient food safety monitoring should achieve optimal resource allocation. Our study combined Bayesian network (BN) and optimization models into a single framework to optimize the use of resources for food safety monitoring aimed at identifying non-compliant samples and estimating background level of hazards in food. The framework was applied to...

Agricultural commodities used for feed and food production are frequently contaminated with mycotoxins, such as Aflatoxin B1 (AFB1). In Europe, both the government and companies have monitoring programs in place for the presence of AFB1. With limited resources and following risk-based monitoring as prescribed in EU Regulation 2017/625, these monito...

Broiler houses are an important source of particulate matter (PM) in the Netherlands. High concentrations of PM can threaten the environment and pose health risks to humans and animals. To address these problems, the Dutch government aims to reduce PM10 emissions originating from broiler houses by 50% between 2020 and 2030. This paper explored broi...

We demonstrate how earlier approaches to model the impact that corporate social responsibility (CSR) has on investment inefficiency are likely to be incorrect and propose use of the stochastic frontier methodology to model this relationship. We apply the approach to a sample of European listed companies, providing robust evidence that CSR performan...

The conventional dynamic cost inefficiency model relies on the directional distance function with an exogenous directional vector to measure technical and allocative inefficiency. However, this approach may lead to contradictory recommendations for firms to become technically and allocatively efficient. By definition, the conventional model forces...

This article proposes an innovative approach to evaluate firms' inefficiency accounting for corporate social responsibility. In the first step, we estimate dynamic inefficiency for each factor of production using data envelopment analysis. Next, we explore differences in inefficiencies between groups of firms of which participation is determined us...

The economic, environmental and social sustainability of Dutch dairy farms have attracted increasing societal concern in the past decades. In this paper, we propose a recently developed dynamic Luenberger indicator based on the by-production model to measure dynamic productivity growth in the economic, environmental and social dimensions of sustain...

In the past decade, corporate firms have globally increasingly adopted corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices; however, so far less is known about how productivity change in the presence of socially responsible and undesirable output can be evaluated. This paper develops a framework that integrates CSR in a dynamic by‐production technology...

Intensive shrimp production is a potential pathway to increasing export quantity and meeting Vietnamese national export targets set for the 2020–2030 period. Vietnamese farmers need to efficiently manage their shrimp farming to compete in global markets. This study aims to investigate input- and output-specific technical and scale inefficiencies in...

Business interaction is important for innovation performance but may be challenging in cross-border regions. The objective of this research was to investigate the relation between factors that define cross-border business interaction and innovativeness. From the cross-border regional innovation systems literature, we operationalized thirty-five fac...

The European Union fosters cooperation in cross-border regions through the European Cohesion Policy (ECP). The implementation of ECP instruments requires a participatory approach, in which stakeholders’ views are acknowledged. However, the multiple of views among and between stakeholders of cross-border initiatives complicate their involvement in a...

CONTEXT In response to societal concerns, the European Union set up goals to address the negative impact of intensive broiler production on animal welfare, the environment and human health. OBJECTIVE This paper aimed to 1) explore combinations of system changes that perform best in terms of farm income, animal welfare, emissions of ammonia (NH3) a...

This paper aims to investigate the association between perceived production risk of horticultural farms and access to finance from different finance providers. The collection of data was conducted among 434 farmers in Indonesia particularly farmers produced mango, mangosteen, chili and red onion. Production risk was measured by the coefficient of v...

A Bayesian non-neutral stochastic input distance function model is used to examine whether output specialization has an impact on the economic performance of vegetable producers in Benin. Specialization is assumed to have an effect on the production frontier itself, as well as on the distance of each producer's observed data to this frontier (techn...

The introduction of Xylella fastidiosa in Apulia has resulted in the desiccation of millions of olive trees. Here, we employ a multi-country partial equilibrium model to analyze the possible distribution of economic impacts among olive oil processors and consumers. The results suggest that the majority of the impacts would fall on consumers as a co...

Differences in technical efficiency across farms are one of the major factors explaining differences in farm survival and growth and changes in farm industry structure. This study employs Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to compute technical inefficiency scores for output, energy, materials, pesticides and fertiliser of a sample of Dutch indoor vege...

The book takes on a systematic treatment of dynamic decision making and performance measurement. The analytical foundations of the dynamic production technology are introduced and developed in detail for several primal representations of the technology with an emphasis on dynamic directional distance functions. Dynamic cost minimization and dynamic...

This chapter focuses on the nonparametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) framework of structural linear programming models underlying the estimation of efficiency. The nonparametric approach to measuring technical and cost inefficiency has been adopted in the examples in earlier chapters. Chapter 3 introduced the notions of inner- and outer-bound...

The concept of efficiency involves measuring the current practice against the maximum potential for a given technology. This chapter addresses the intertemporal measurement of economic growth and performance at the firm level, the dynamic generalizations of the economies of scale and scope, and capacity utilization in the context of the directional...

This chapter discusses three concepts of the directional distance function in the presence of internal adjustment costs, designated as adjustment cost directional distance functions. These functions are the building blocks of technical inefficiency measures. Duality between an adjustment cost directional distance function and an indirect optimal va...

This chapter develops dynamic production analysis within the context of the adjustment cost model of the firm, where adjustment costs are associated with changes in the level of the quasi-fixed factors, also known as internal adjustment costs. The chapter characterizes axiomatically several primal representations of the adjustment cost production t...

This chapter presents dynamic optimization for economic decision making in the context of both dynamic cost minimization and dynamic profit maximization given different primal representations of the dynamic technology. The Bellman equation of dynamic programming serves as the analytical foundation for the duality between the production technology a...

Context Intensive broiler production systems are criticized by EU citizens because of their negative impact on animal welfare, the environment and human health. Objective To inform the development of sustainable broiler production systems, this paper provides insight in the synergies and trade-offs between different external factors originating fr...

Early 2013, high concentrations of aflatoxin M 1 were found in the bulk milk of a few dairy farms in the Netherlands. These high concentrations were caused by aflatoxin B 1 contaminated maize from Eastern Europe that was processed into compound feed, which was fed to dairy cows. Since the contamination was discovered in the downstream stages of the...

This article proposes a model for evaluating inefficiency accounting for firms’ corporate social responsibility engagement as part of their broader output production activities. The model combines the production of marketable outputs, socially responsible outputs, and undesirable outputs into overall measures of firm performance using data envelopm...

Fusarium species infection in wheat can lead to Fusarium Head Blight (FHB) and contamination with mycotoxins. To fully exploit more recent insights into FHB and mycotoxin management, farmers might need to adapt their agronomic management, which can be stimulated through incentives. This study aimed to identify incentives to stimulate European farme...

Insects have tremendous potential for utilising the waste generated from other agricultural sectors to produce high value protein. The by-product of insect production, insect waste streams, can be recycled and repurposed for promoting the health of crops and soil as the chitin, present in the moulted skins, acts as a substrate for beneficial microb...

This article develops a framework for assessing the implementation of standards in a context of multiple negative externalities resulting from meat production. The framework is applied to the introduction of the New Dutch Retail Standard in the Dutch broiler market, a standard on animal welfare initiated by the private sector with national coverage...

Food safety monitoring is essential for hazard identification in food chain, but its application may be limited due to costly analytical methods and (inefficient) sampling procedures. The objective of this study was to design cost-effective monitoring schemes for food safety contaminants along the food production chain, given restricted monitoring...

Econometric approaches provide another avenue to implementing the frameworks and concepts of dynamic efficiency and productivity measurement. This chapter addresses both structural and reduced-form econometric approaches to estimating the dynamic directional distance function directly as well as to estimating the cost function that accommodates tec...

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the biggest health threats for both humans and animals. This justifies the need for a conceptual framework that provides an integrated assessment of the measures and strategies that can be applied within livestock supply chains to reduce the risks of human exposure to resistant pathogens. The aim of this study is...

The introduction of Xylella fastidiosa subsp. pauca in Puglia (Italy) has disturbed the flow of ecosystem services (ES). We assessed the short-and long term impacts of this disease and the control measures against it on ES provisioning and biodiversity in the olive-producing agroecosystem of Puglia at a landscape level by using an ES framework in c...

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the biggest health threats for both humans and animals. This justifies the need for a conceptual framework that provides an integrated assessment of the measures and strategies that can be applied within livestock supply chains to reduce the risks of human exposure to resistant pathogens. The aim of this study is...

The COVID‐19 pandemic has shocked financial and commodity markets around the world. We are analyzing stock prices and information from financial reports to examine the impact of the pandemic on stock price volatility and profits of companies in the food supply chain. We use a data set of 71 major listed companies in the food value chain from stock...

Food safety monitoring faces the challenge of tackling multiple chemicals along the various stages of the food supply chain. Our study developed a methodology for optimizing sampling for monitoring multiple chemicals along the dairy supply chain. We used a mixed integer nonlinear programming approach to maximize the performance of the sampling in t...

Infection of wheat by Fusarium species can lead to Fusarium Head Blight (FHB) and mycotoxin contamination, thereby reducing food quality and food safety, and leading to economic losses. Agronomic management through the implementation of various pre-harvest measures can reduce the probability of Fusarium spp. infection in the wheat field. To design...

Traditional benchmarking implicitly assumes that decision making units operate in isolation from their peers. For arable production systems in particular, this assumption is unlikely to hold in reality. This paper quantifies spatial spillovers on input‐specific inefficiency using data envelopment analysis and a second‐stage bootstrap truncated regr...

Genetic improvement of animals has been an important source of productivity growth in dairy farming. Studying the effect of genetic progress on productivity growth of farms requires a long-term dynamic perspective due to the long generation interval of dairy animals, and the slow, persistent and cumulative effects of genetics. It is also essential...

Changes in substitutability among inputs and outputs can help farms adapt to economic, technological, or societal changes. However, measurement of technical bias has only been carried out in a static framework, ignoring the confounding effects of technical bias due to adjustment costs. This paper integrates two streams of literature, that is one me...

We apply dynamic data envelopment analysis (DEA) to estimate dynamic cost inefficiency for a sample of European Union (EU) large meat processing firms over the period 2005–2012 and decompose this into the contributions of technical and allocative inefficiency. The estimation of dynamic inefficiencies controls for adjustment costs associated with fi...

This article integrates corporate social responsibility (CSR) into a dynamic by-production framework and examines the factors associated with CSR performance. The application focuses on panel data of European food and beverage firms over the period 2013-2017. The results show that material input, labour input and undesirable output can be contacted...

Xylella fastidiosa is the causal agent of plant diseases that cause massive economic damage. In 2013, a strain of the bacterium was, for the first time, detected in the European territory (Italy), causing the Olive Quick Decline Syndrome. We simulate future spread of the disease based on climatic-suitability modeling and radial expansion of the inv...

This study examines the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and dynamic productivity change of each input employed and investment undertaken in the US food and beverage manufacturing industry. We compute input‐ and investment‐specific dynamic Luenberger indicators and decompose them into the contributions of input‐ and invest...

This article examines the presence of spatial spillovers in farms’ dynamic technical inefficiency scores using Data Envelopment Analysis and a second‐stage spatial truncated bootstrap regression model. Dynamic inefficiency is measured in terms of variable input contraction and gross investment expansion, while the second‐stage model allows an indiv...

The aim of the present study was to explore the relation between both farm performance and antimicrobial use (AMU) of broiler farms. Farm performance was expressed as technical efficiency, obtained by using a bootstrap data envelopment analysis. AMU was expressed as treatment incidence. Cluster analysis is used to obtain groups of farms with simila...

Antimicrobial resistance is a global threat for both human and animal health. One of the main drivers of antimicrobial resistance is inappropriate antimicrobial use in livestock production. The aim of this study was to examine the technical and economic impact of tailor-made interventions, aimed at reducing antimicrobial use in broiler production....

An optimization model was used to gain insight into cost‐effective monitoring plans for aflatoxins along the maize supply chain. The model was based on a typical Dutch maize chain, with maize grown in the Black Sea region, and transported by ship to the Netherlands for use as an ingredient in compound feed for dairy cattle. Six different scenarios,...

Fusarium spp. are one of the most widespread mycotoxin-producing fungi in small-grain cereals like wheat. Their rate of infection and production of mycotoxins is mainly influenced by weather and pre-harvest agronomic measures. Consequently, farmers' prevention and control of mycotoxins are imperative since it is difficult to remove mycotoxins furth...

This study analyzes the spatial dynamics in productivity growth and its components for a sample of agri‐food companies in Murcia (Spain) over the period 2005–2014. We find that productivity growth of a company is related to productivity growth of neighboring companies, in both the short and long term. The marginal effects of the different factors o...

Mobile applications (apps) have become popular among consumers to facilitate their existing food practices like cooking, shopping, and dining out. However, the feasibility of using mobile apps to facilitate sustainability transitions in food consumption is not well researched. In this study, we, therefore, propose a conceptual framework to illustra...

Two main models have been used to analyse farmers' decisions to adopt an innovation; the first is based on the concept of utility maximisation (UM) and the second is based on the theory of planned behaviour (TPB). This study uses a vote-count method to identify the effect of different variables on farmers' adoption decisions in 36 studies using eit...

Manual weeding is the predominant weed control practice and the most labor‐consuming activity in smallholder, rainfed rice systems in sub‐Saharan Africa. This study investigates the technical inefficiency of weeding labor, other labor and overall inputs, and identifies sources of technical inefficiency of weeding labor in the context of parasitic w...

This article extends the by-production model to the dynamic context of adjustment costs associated with investment. The empirical application focuses on panel data of French suckler cow farms over the period 1978–2014, considering emissions of greenhouse gases as bad output. The paper estimates input and output-specific technical inefficiency score...

If we aim to increase the sustainability of farming, we must be able to measure the sustainability of individual farms and relate this sustainability to the characteristics of the farm and its management. We hypothesized that (i) sustainability can be expressed using social profit, and (ii) socio-economic characteristics and management practices of...

Genetic improvement of animals plays an important role in improving the economic and environmental sustainability of livestock production systems. This paper proposes a method to incorporate mitigation of environmental impacts and risk preferences of producers into a breeding objective via economic values (EVs). The paper assesses the effects of us...

The presence of hazards (e.g., contaminants, pathogens) in food/feed, water, plants, or animals can lead to major economic losses related to human and animal health or the rejection of batches of food or feed. Monitoring these hazards is important but can lead to high costs. This study aimed to find the most cost‐effective sampling and analysis (S&...

Food manufacturers that offer credence attributes, whose presence cannot be determined a priori, may fail to differentiate their products effectively and achieve higher prices if asymmetric information (on the producers’ side) impairs their ability to reach consumers with higher willingness to pay. In this article, we assess whether manufacturers c...

Measuring corporate sustainability performance is necessary to guide sustainability improvements. Although many indicators exist that capture the different dimensions of sustainability, a composite indicator that integrates across all indicators is important as it helps to summarize multi-dimensional issues and provide synthesized information. This...

The European Food Safety Authority’s has established procedures for the identification of emerging risk in food and feed. The main objectives are to: (i) to carry out activities aiming at identifying, assessing and disseminating information on emerging issues and ensure coordination with relevant networks and international organisations; (ii) promo...

Invasive species such as Ambrosia (an annual weed) pose a biosecurity risk whose management depends on the knowledge, attitudes and practices of many stakeholders. It can therefore be considered a complex policy and risk gover-nance problem. Complex policy problems are characterised by high uncertainty, multiple dimensions, interactions across diff...

Economic values (EVs) of traits, accounting for environmental impacts and risk preferences of farmers, are required to design breeding goals that contribute to both economic and environmental sustainability. The objective of this study was to assess the effects of incorporating environmental costs and the risk preferences of farmers on the EVs of p...

The adoption rate of sensors on dairy farms varies widely. Whereas some sensors are hardly adopted, others are adopted by many farmers. A potential rational explanation for the difference in adoption may be the expected future technological progress in the sensor technology and expected future improved decision support possibilities. For some senso...

This paper assesses the effect of Marine Stewardship Council certification on the allocation of fishing effort by Filipino purse seine fishers operating in the waters of the Parties to the Nauru Agreement. Targeting skipjack tuna, these purse seiners allocate effort under a vessel day scheme to either MSC certified free school fishing or non-MSC ce...

Vietnamese pangasius farming needs to produce efficiently to compete in world markets. This study investigates the input- and output-specific technical inefficiency of Vietnamese pangasius farmers. First, we used a Russell-type (input–output) directional distance function to estimate the input- and output-specific technical inefficiency. Second, we...

This study analyses the factors driving the stay-exit intention of small livestock farmers located in southern Chile. Technical, economic, and social characteristics from 212 farmers were included in this study. Through an empirical probit model we identified the variables that should be considered when developing rural policies aimed at increasing...

This paper introduces a nonparametric framework for analysing dynamic profit inefficiency and applies this to a sample of Belgian, specialised dairy farms from 1996 to 2008. Profit inefficiency is decomposed into technical and allocative inefficiency. The paper also decomposes profit inefficiency into the contributions of output, input, and investm...

This paper proposes a dynamic multidirectional inefficiency analysis approach within the context of Data Envelopment Analysis to measuring input- and investment-specific managerial and program inefficiency for groups of firms characterized by different technologies. Dynamic managerial inefficiency refers to the distance to the firms’ group-specific...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to measure the technical inefficiency of dairy farms and subsequently investigate the factors affecting technical inefficiency in the Malaysian dairy industry. Design/methodology/approach This study uses multi-directional efficiency analysis to measure the technical inefficiency scores on a sample of 200 farm o...