AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS Agricultural Economics 42 (2011) 561–575 Ranking farms with a composite indicator of sustainability Ernest Reig-Mart´ ınez a,b, ∗ , Jos´ e A. G ´ omez-Lim´ on c , Andr´ es J. Picazo-Tadeo d a Universitat de Val` encia, Dpto. Econom´ ıa Aplicada II, Campus dels Tarongers, 46022 Valencia, Spain b Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Econ´ omicas (IVIE), C/Guardia Civil, 22, 46020 Valencia, Spain c Instituto Andaluz de Investigaci´ on y Formaci´ on Agraria y Pesquera, Dpto. Econom´ ıa Agraria, P.O. Box 3092, 14080 C´ ordoba, Spain d Universitat de Val` encia, Dpto. Econom´ ıa Aplicada II, Campus dels Tarongers, 46022 Valencia, Spain Received 14 June 2010; received in revised form 18 October 2010; accepted 21 December 2010 Abstract The assessment of sustainability at farm level has been growing in popularity over the last few years. This article contributes to this line of research by building up composite indicators for different facets—social, economic, environmental, and global—of farm sustainability using a methodological approach that combines data envelopment analysis (DEA) and multicriteria decision making (MCDM) methods, and assigns common weights to each individual sustainability indicator. This approach is applied to a database of 163 farms located in the Campos County, a region belonging to the dry lands of the Spanish Northern Plateau, using 12 individual indicators of sustainability. Our findings show that both economic and environmental composite sustainability indicators are positively correlated, but that this is not the case for the social indicator. We also check the influence of a set of variables on farm sustainability using bootstrapping statistical techniques, and showing that increasing farm size, membership in agricultural cooperatives and farmers’ medium and upper agricultural-specific technical education, all exert a significant positive influence on sustainability. These results provide clues for policy makers that intend to design sustainability-increasing structural agricultural policies. JEL classifications: C61, D60, H41, Q10 Keywords: Sustainability index; Agriculture; Data envelopment analysis; Multicriteria decision making; Spain 1. Introduction Sustainability is a widely used concept, which gained popu- larity after the famous Brundtland Report, which defined sus- tainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future gen- erations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987: 43). This definition reflects the simultaneous consideration of three im- portant aspects: recognition of the limited availability of natural resources, acceptance of the need for intergenerational equity, and several social and spatial issues summarized as intragener- ational equity (Becker, 1997). However, despite the impressive amount of scientific literature that followed, “sustainability” remains a vague and elusive term when it comes to empirical research. In the specific case of agriculture, considerable research ef- forts have been made to overcome the conceptual vagueness of sustainability by defining the appropriate scale of reference to ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +34-963-828-339/49; fax: +34-963-828-354. E-mail address: Ernest.reig@uv.es (E. Reig-Mart´ ınez). assess sustainability and by developing an adequate theoreti- cal framework to integrate the diverse aspects of sustainability (Hansen, 1996; Rao and Rogers, 2006; Raman, 2006). But there has been no agreement to date on a common analytic framework that could simultaneously meet the needs of policy makers and researchers in this field. Policy making operates on a larger geographical scale than farming-system research and has pushed sustainability studies in the direction of developing analytical frameworks that com- prise sets of indicators defined at national level and ready for international comparisons (EEA, 2005; OECD, 2001). How- ever, researchers concerned with the interaction between agri- culture and biodiversity or agriculture and the quality of the natural environment, tend to emphasize that economic and eco- logical interrelations are most pronounced at farm level, even if environmental information is frequently lacking (van Wenum et al., 1999). Consequently, defining agroenvironmental indi- cators at national or regional level is not appropriate when indicators are intended to provide information regarding the environmental value of agricultural ecosystems. Therefore, the need to collect and use farm or local farming system specific c  2011 International Association of Agricultural Economists DOI: 10.1111/j.1574-0862.2011.00536.x