Assessing the Impact of Agricultural Research: Data Requirements and Quality of Current Statistics in Europe

Assessing the impact of agricultural research on sustainability targets often implies to face two main issues: the complexity of the causal path, and the lack of appropriate data. In this paper, we discuss which data would be necessary to measure short- and long-term impacts in Europe, and suggest a set of indicators to evaluate their quality, exploiting both available metadata (qualitative indicator) and the evidence stemming from the data themselves (quantitative indicator based on missing values, temporal contiguity and outliers). An application is shown for a subset of variables. According to our results, qualitative and quantitative indicators often provide conflicting information.