Tomas Balezentis

Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences

The production of high-quality seeds and planting material is the basis for increasing the efficiency and sustainability of crop production. The main aim of this article is to develop proposals to ensure that supply meets the demand in the seed and planting material market Ukraine. The future prospects are also discussed. The paper uses statistical...

The interconnected global trading system has proved to be both vulnerable and resistant to crises, despite its asymmetries. The global trading system is constantly changing under the influence of such factors as the digitalization of economic processes and the growing number of nontariff measures to regulate trade volumes, including trade protectio...

Food loss and waste is relevant for all stages of a food supply chain. Methodological and empirical solutions are needed to properly quantify these losses. The present paper embarks on the quantification of food loss in the Lithuanian food processing sector. This issue has not received substantial coverage in the literature yet, even though the tra...

E-commerce provides opportunities to extend the market and plays a vital role in modern economy. However, its implementation often requires high-level technical infrastructure. This study regards both e-commerce and R&D as input factors and analyses their impact on firm output in the manufacturing sector of China. We find that e-commerce capital st...

With the increasing affluence, the differences in CO2 emission between urban and rural residential sectors are remarkable and show an increasing trend. In case of China, residential sector accounts for a substantial share of the national CO2 emission, bringing greater pressure to achieve the goal of carbon peak. Analyzing the emission inequality tr...

Strategic emerging industries facilitate the deep integration of emerging technologies and strategic industries. Exploring the factors of the innovation efficiency of strategic emerging industries are of great significance to effectively implement the strategy of innovation-driven development and enhance national core competitiveness. In order to i...

Private charging pile sharing is an innovative business model alleviating the shortage of well-developed publicly accessible charging infrastructure, which has been evident in large cities. However, the lack of effective benefit distribution scheme impedes the implementation and promotion of private charging pile sharing projects. To address this d...

This paper focuses on the state-of-the-art analysis of the concepts relevant to the functioning of agricultural supply chains. The viable supply chains concept is considered to be the most comprehensive one that encompasses sustainability, agility and resilience. However, this concept has scarcely been applied to agricultural supply chains. Thus, w...

Achieving carbon neutrality is crucial for the global economy to ensure sustainable development. Quantitative approaches are needed to track the emissions and determinants thereof. The Generalized Divisia Index (GDI) has received wide attention to quantify major factors driving CO 2 emissions. However, there has been no research on the application...

Energy policy affects the functioning of the economic and financial systems of countries worldwide. This paper provides a theoretical overview of the economy-energy nexus and discusses the particular cases of the energy policy dynamics amid the sustainability goals. This paper integrates multiple perspectives on the energy-economy nexus, with a par...

Research on economic resilience in agriculture is quite complicated due to the interdisciplinary nature of the notion. In agricultural, climate change, sustainability and food security research it appears as an endogenous phenomenon rather as the main one. This study aims to contribute to conceptualization of economic resilience in agriculture, rev...

This publication is an external report for the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission's science and knowledge service. It aims to provide evidence-based scientific support to the European policymaking process. The contents of this publication do not necessarily reflect the position or opinion of the European Commission. Neither the E...

This paper explores the issue of food waste in the Lithuanian retail sector. A questionnaire survey was designed in order to collect the relevant data from both the largest retail chains with stores around the country and companies with small-scale stores in rural areas. The present case is interesting as the literature on Central and Eastern Europ...

The sustainability-related decision-making oftentimes involves uncertain information. One of the key solutions in representing the interval information is the use of the interval information (numbers). This paper proposes a multi-criteria decision-making approach that relies on the algebra of random variables in handling the interval information. T...

Urban and regional development is indispensable from energy systems that function in a sustainable and resilient manner. The generation of renewable energy has seen significant upturn in the last decade. Renewables can be exploited to meet the global energy needs and climate change mitigation goals. Therefore, development of urban and regional ener...

This study aims to investigate the relationship between sustainability and resilience concepts in agriculture. First, we discuss the theoretical preliminaries related to the definition of these two concepts. Indeed, the literature considers sustainability as a proxy for resilience and vice versa in the context of agriculture. Intuitively, one may e...

Sustainable development of marine economy requires strengthening the marine environmental monitoring and management. Conductivity-Temperature-Depth (CTD) realises multi-dimensional monitoring of marine environment by measuring the traits of seawater. To further promote real-time online marine monitoring, conducting a robust assessment of CTD equipm...

This paper analyses the trends and sources of change in agricultural revenue for the new European Union (EU) member states, namely Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. These countries still lag behind the old EU member states in terms of profitability, productivity, and farm size. Thus, assessment of the patterns in agricultural revenue changes in these...

This paper presents a framework for decomposition of changes in farm profitability with regards to structural, activity and intensity (efficiency) effects. The Index Decomposition Analysis (IDA) is adapted for isolation of the effects of profit margin, asset turnover, leverage, capital intensity and structure. The proposed approach complements the...

Financial agglomeration (FA) may play an essential role in enhancing energy efficiency (EE) and, thus, is important from both theoretical and empirical viewpoints. However, few studies have investigated the causal nonlinear relationship between FA and EE. Hence, we first extend the novel ray slacks-based measure with global technology to evaluate t...

Educational equity significantly supports the creation of a harmonious society, which has become one of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations for 2030. Chi-na's education level has greatly improved as nine-year compulsory education popularized and enrollment expanded in higher education. However, educational inequality remains a s...

Currently, national bodies and international congregations, such as that of the Stock‐ holm, Rio, and Johannesburg conferences, jointly identified that sustainable energy devel‐ opment has proven to be a very challenging factor in global development. Indicative sus‐ tainability challenges facing humanity include greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) and...

The conventional convexity assumptions frequently placed on piecewise linear frontiers of production technologies modeled using data envelopment analysis imply non-increasing marginal products. Assuming geometric convexity in the context of the exponential technology represents a more general alternative that imposes no underlying restrictions on t...

This paper applies the Bennet total factor productivity (TFP) indicator and the economic surplus methodology to identify the stakeholders who generate or consume the gains from the productivity growth. The case of Lithuania is considered. The period covered is 2001–2020. The annual TFP growth of 2.3% is observed. The results confirm price advantage...

The European transition to green economy is based on long-term strategies. The Europe 2020 Strategy was launched in 2010 in order to promote smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth in the region. Later, the ambitions regarding this strategy were followed by the Green Deal and Sustainable Development Goals. Now, the effort of countries towards the...

We discuss an environmental Luenberger–Hicks–Moorsteen (LHM) total factor productivity (TFP) indicator and its decomposition that incorporates a negative externality into the measurement of economic performance. Special cases of a generalized environmental directional distance function are involved in the definition of this LHM indicator and its pr...

Properly addressing the environmental issue requires suitable treatment for energy use and capital investment. This paper links the Bounded-adjusted Measure (BAM) model to the managerial disposability model. The additive structure allows measuring inefficiency with regards to individual input/output variables and identifying whether a certain unit...

Identifying the carbon emission characteristics, driving factors, and decoupling status of the industrial subsectors is important for developing effective policy measures. This allows for implementing industrial emission reduction that, eventually, decouple carbon emission and economic growth. Such an analysis is especially important for the case o...

Capacity utilization (CU) may show the potential for production growth under improved availability of the (variable and fixed) inputs. However, the environmental constraints should be considered when taking the production decisions. These questions are important in the context of the agricultural sector that needs to ensure food security and sustai...

The current paper proposes analytical solution of the problem of optimal allocation of resources in the game of two parties, based on the production function of Cobb-Douglas with constant returns under changing scale of production. The Edgeworth box is used to derive the main scientific findings of this research, namely: the analytic representation...

The pros and cons of economic cooperation and integration have often been debated in the literature. Trade theory suggests that national economies could benefit from multilateral cooperation in international trade and investment owing to transnational division of labour, the mobility of production factors and technology diffusion. The Belt and Road...

The ranking of decision-making units can be performed by measuring their efficiency. However, the discriminatory power of efficiency measures is sometimes compromised, and complete rankings are not attained. Additionally, environmental performance must be considered when assessing the sustainability of operations. This paper applies the “average co...

Creation of sustainable society and transition to low-carbon energy system are the main priorities of the EU policy. Energy poverty (EP) is one of the most important social problems linked to low-carbon transition as creation of carbon neutral societies requires to address other important sustainability issues linked with carbon-free future. Althou...

Interval-valued functional clustering is a novel approach for functional data analysis where each observation is represented by an interval. Existing interval-valued functional clustering methods typically rely on the interval-valued functional Hausdorff distance, which considers the upper and lower bounds of interval-valued functions but ignores t...

Combined decomposition of relative productivity growth and absolute changes in input/output variables helps to identify the driving forces of energy conservation and emission reduction. This paper proposes a framework based on the Luenberger productivity indicator (LPI) and the logarithmic mean Divisia index (LMDI) approach to analyze the energy–ec...

In recent years, humanity has faced with multiple crises, both of economic and environmental nature. Among the key reasons for such turbulences, the deteriorating agri-environmental situation appears as an important facet. This article evaluates agri-environmental situation of selected European Union (EU) countries using the multi-criteria decision...

Functional principal component analysis (FPCA) is an extension of conventional principal component analysis (PCA) that allows the processing of functional data. Besides the reduction in dimensionality that is inherent to PCA, FPCA relies on fewer assumptions and offers a greater ability to visualize the functional data. Thus, FPCA can be used in, f...

Food loss and waste occur along the whole food supply chain and need to be addressed by dedicated strategies. Among all the stages of the food supply chain, food loss in primary production has been the least studied to date. In order to address this gap, this paper focuses on on-farm food loss, using Lithuania as a case study. The research comprise...

This paper estimates the eco-efficiency, shadow price and marginal abatement costs of dairy farms in Lithuania based on Farm Accounting Data Network (FADN) data from 2015, 2017, and 2019. The Slacks-Based Measure-Data Envelopment Analysis (SBM-DEA) model is applied for approximating the environmental production technology. Herd size, labour, feed c...

Hedge funds have become an important part of the financial sector. The development of the hedge funds in the Nordic countries has been rather robust. Therefore, it is important to identify the determinants of the hedge fund performance and isolate the managerial performance, i.e., the Jensen’s alpha. To this end, this paper construct cross sectiona...

Agricultural production and productivity are important from multiple perspectives, including environmental protection, food self-sufficiency, renewable energy sources as well as economic returns. The earlier literature has sparsely addressed the biological and economic productivity dynamics when decomposing the changes in the output of agriculture...

As the economic and technological problems become more complex and require effective multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) tools for analysis thereof, there is a need for comprehensive MCDM techniques that would be capable to ensure robust optimization with minimum arbitrary assumptions. This paper proposes a new method for MCDM-the Kernel-based Co...

Consequent to increasing higher education attainment and the expansion of higher education institutions, many countries have embarked on assessing discipline efficiency to track performance, promote competition, and ensure reasonable resource allocation. Therefore, measuring scientific-research efficiency is a crucial part of evaluating a disciplin...

The penetration of renewable energy is one of the main challenges for sustainable energy development. Local governments across the European Union commit to development and implementation of the Sustainable Energy (and Climate) Action Plan. This paper focuses on the case of Lithuania-a Central and Eastern European country. Almost one-third of Lithua...

The development of shipping companies relies on multiple financing channels and requires decisions to be made regarding fleet management. Therefore, a firm’s performance should be modeled based on multiple decision variables. The purpose of this paper is to develop a quantitative approach for determining the investment portfolio of a shipping compa...

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) initiated by Chinese government could be regarded as a systematic framework for promoting economic cooperation and development among the countries along the Belt and Road and China. This paper attempts to analyze economic and environmental performance in 61 developing countries along Belt and Road. An additive tot...

Telemedicine is an effective way to address the excessive concentration of quality medical resources. Telemedicine platforms provide users with diversified high-quality medical and health services. These issues are topical in the context of the recent pandemic and the resulting socioeconomic transformations. In order to meet the multilevel and pers...

“Sustainability” journal, having the following information: Special issue title: Polymer Waste Management. Special issue section: Sustainable Materials. Deadline: 31 December 2021. https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/special_issues/Polymer_Waste_Management Message from the Guest Editors: Polymers are materials associated with energy inten...

Analyzing green transformation of energy use and pollutant emissions in China’s “Three Regions and Ten Urban Agglomerations” (TRTAs) allows effectively promoting sustainable development in the country. This paper applies Data Envelopment Analysis, namely the Bounded-adjusted Measure (BAM) relying on the additive structure, to measure the technical...

This article proposes a decomposition approach for the agricultural labour productivity change that takes into account the land-to-labour ratio, intermediate consumption intensity and intermediate consumption productivity. The case of the three Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) is considered which is interesting in the light of the Europea...

Productivity analysis has been an important avenue for economic research. Therefore, medleys of quantitative techniques have been proposed to operationalize productivity analysis. In this paper, we propose an extended by-production model which ensures a link between the production and the pollution-generating sub-technologies. The correspondin...

The choice of the energy storage technology involves multiple criteria that need to be simultaneously considered in the energy planning process. The development of sustainable energy system requires to take into account not only technical characteristics of storage technologies but also to pursue sustainability issues. The paper aims to perform not...

This paper proposes an integrated approach towards rapid decision-making in the agricultural sector aimed at improvement of its resilience. Methodologically, we seek to devise a framework that is able to take the uncertainty regarding policy preferences into account. Empirically, we focus on the effects of COVID-19 on agriculture. First, we propose...

This paper suggests that the efficiency of a system (decision-making unit) and its subsystem cannot be properly measured using a two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) model either in cooperative or non-cooperative evaluation. Indeed, the existing methods subjectively determine the status of the subsystems in the whole system. The two-stage DEA...

In this paper, we attempt to identify the major groups of decision making units (dairy farms) contributing to the aggregate efficiency change. We also suggest identifying influential peers in order to gain more insights into possible development strategies within a sector. The empirical application focuses on specialist dairy farms in Lithuania. Th...

The agriculture in Eastern Europe has seen a number of economic and social transitions. This research examines the gender inequality in agriculture by taking the case of an Eastern European country – Lithuania – as an example. The questionnaire survey was employed in order to check the existence of gender inequality. The study focuses on the young...

The objective of this paper is to analyse the main drivers of households’ acceptance of renewable energy sources and to assess their willingness to pay for extension of renewable energy sources in the electricity balance of a European Union Member State – Lithuania. The data were collected through a questionnaire survey. The contingent valuation me...

The paper deals with the exposition of the main barriers and drivers of renewable energy usage in rural communities. Climate change mitigation is causing governments, policymakers, and international organizations worldwide to embark on policies, leading to increased use of renewable energy sources and improvement of energy efficiency. Climate chang...

Purpose This paper seeks to identify the prevailing streams in the research of climate-smart agriculture in order to help to conceptualize this new scientific notion and assist in drawing clear borders between climate-smart agriculture, agricultural sustainability and resilience. Design/methodology/approach In order to conceptualize the climate-sm...

Performance evaluation is a comprehensive process for comparing activities compared with predetermined organizational criteria. Based on the results of performance evaluation, organizations can embark on purposeful actions to improve their situation. Obviously, the success of organizations and the economic development of the country depend on the p...

This paper seeks to account for differences in productivity of the industrial and non-industrial activities in the productivity analysis framework. The Luenberger productivity indicator is widely applied to analyze the productivity change, and can be decomposed as it follows the additive structure. But there have been few studies on sector operatio...

The so-called by-production approach, introduced by Murty and Russell [Murty S., Russell R. R., 2002. On modeling pollution-generating technologies. Department of Economics, University of California, Riverside], has provided researchers with an improved methodology for approximating polluting production technologies. However, the original by-produc...

The purpose of this study is to disclose farmers' awareness of environmental responsibility in terms of eco-efficiency and cleaner production in the post-soviet bloc. Theoretical modeling and survey methods were applied. Original empirical data were collected in Lithuanian farms in 2019. The results demonstrate that the patterns of farmers' environ...

This paper focuses on the estimation of carbon shadow price (CSP) by applying the by-production (BP) model within a nonparametric framework. The extended BP model ensures the meaningful shadow price estimation and linkages between the sub-technologies that define production and pollution activities. We focus on the instance of the Fare-Grosskopf-Lo...

Efficient use of energy resources is the key element ensuring the development of the agricultural sector in a sustainable way. The reduction of energy use in Lithuania's agriculture is considered in strategic documents, and the energy efficiency is seen as crucial element of development for ensuring climate neutrality and eventually reaching climat...

Over the recent decades, the evolution of the European Union (EU) agricultural system has resulted in significant structural changes in member states. Knowledge about the nature and main patterns of structural change is critical to select a sustainable development path for the EU agriculture. This paper contributes to the academic discourse on stru...

Such large-scale disruptions as the pandemic increase the uncertainty and risk related to business. Therefore, the business continuity management (BCM) has become an essential technical solution for enterprise emergency response. Since the beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 has spread worldwide at an alarming rate causing many threats to sustainable d...

Purpose The paper embarks on the development of theory and methodology for managing the sustainable development of machine-building enterprises through the use of quantitative modeling tools. The article proposes an algorithm for estimating the position of an enterprise in its competitive space for sustainable development. Design/methodology/appro...

Purpose The proposed DHHFLOWLAD is used to design a recommendation system, which aims to provide the most appropriate treatment to the patient under a double hierarchy hesitant fuzzy linguistic environment. Design/methodology/approach Based on the ordered weighted distance measure and logarithmic aggregation, we first propose a double hierarchy he...

This chapter deals with the performance of EU agriculture from the production economics perspective. The neoclassical economic theory is described and applied to establish the representations of the underlying (environmental) production technology. Parametric and nonparametric methods are invoked to approximate the production technology. Different...

This chapter introduces the main notions underpinning research on the different facets of agricultural development presented in the monograph. These include structural change, productivity, and climate change. The relationships existing among these notions are discussed. The focus is on the European Union agriculture. The theoretical and empirical...

Addressing the multi-criteria group decision making problem with interval attribute values and attribute weights, this paper proposes a decision method based on attribute distribution information. The selection of green suppliers is taken as an example for decision analysis. First, in the case of group decision-making, the quantitative values of th...

Covid-19 pandemic provided many negative effects on world economies and people around the world. The covid-19 creates many threats to sustainability of agriculture sector which is very sensitive because of food supply security needs. First of all, it is necessary to analyse and comprehend the immediate consequences of current pandemic on agricultur...