Applying Entropy Criterion to Input Allocation: an Empirical Analysis of Fertilizer Cost Estimates for European Countries[Application du critère d'entropie à l'allocation des coûts : une analyse empirique des estimations des coûts des engrais pour les pays européens]

The decision to adopt one or another of the sustainable land management alternatives should not be based solely on their respective benefits in terms of climate change mitigation but also on the performances of the productive systems used by farm holdings, assessing their environmental impacts through the cost of specific resources used. This communication uses the entropy criterion in order to estimate the fertilizer costs of specific productions in agriculture, as a replacement proxy for internal soil erosion costs. After recalling the conceptual framework of the estimation of agricultural production costs (Desbois, 2015), we present the empirical data model, the entropy regression approach and the tools used to obtain typologies of European countries based on the conditional distributions of fertilizer cost empirical estimates. The comparative analysis of econometric results for main products between European countries illustrates the relevance of this approach for international comparisons based on their input specific productivity.