WBS Professor Victor Podinovski has been awarded a European Union grant for a research project "Integrated Econometric and Mathematical programming models into an amendable policy and market analysis tool using FADN database".

The €236,000 (£205,000) grant is a part of the collaborative project 265616 funded by the EU under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). There are 11 other European partner universities collaborating on this grant which in total is worth more than €3 million. The project started in April 2011 and will continue for three years until the end of March 2014.

Victor explained, "The aim of the project is to develop operational research and econometric methodologies for the assessment of efficiency of European agricultural farms and tools for simulating implications of policy decisions in the EU agricultural sector. The Warwick contribution to this collaborative project is in the form of performance assessment models and techniques that belong to the area of operational research known as data envelopment analysis (DEA)."

He continued, "Warwick Business School has gained a strong international reputation as a leading school in this area and the fit of the current EU project with our existing expertise is almost perfect. Several Warwick academics are involved in the project, including our new Research Associate Iryna Deineko."

The principal source of data for the project is the vast EU Farm Accountancy Database (FADN) that contains thousands of characteristics and parameters collected over many years at individual farm level for all EU countries.

In the first phase of the project, the WBS team will be employing novel sophisticated models developed at Warwick to identify various patterns characterising potential response of farms to policy changes. In the second phase they will be looking at the integration of the Warwick techniques with the approaches of the other partners in order to develop a unified tool useful for EU policy analysts.