Evaluation of food security among European Union countries using multivariate statistical analysis

The purpose of this paper is to determine the level of food security in European Union member countries using selected socioeconomic indicators. The data for the research are gathered from FAOSTAT's and EUROSTAT's public databases for year 2020. We examine four socioeconomic indicators from the access pillar based on FAOSTAT, and two agricultural indicators. Following indicators are considered as stimulants, namely gross domestic product in purchasing power standard, median equivalised net income, government expenditures for agricultural R&D and agricultural factor income. On the contrary, indicators like the proportion of total household expenditures spent on food and the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity are considered as inhibitors. The data has been normalized using the min-max transformation. To achieve the set goal, we use a multivariate statistical method - Factor Analysis. We have used Principal Component Analysis without rotation to estimate the Factor Analysis Model. The 73,8% of total variability of original data has been explained by one common factor, that was used to catch the phenomenon of food security among analysed countries. From the above results, we conclude that the most food secure countries are Ireland, Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany, which achieve the highest values of common factor. On the contrary, Bulgaria and Romania rank among the most food insecure countries with the lowest values of common factor.