Socioeconomic Relations of Food Waste in Selected European Countries

Abstract

The present paper deals with the issue of food waste in selected European countries, in which we have tried to analyze the socioeconomic rations. The main aim of our research was to analyze food waste quantity and compare the amount of wasted food in European Union countries (except Cyprus due to the unavailability of food waste data). The analysis was based on a dataset provided through the Food Waste Index Report 2021 by the UN environment program and complemented by socioeconomic variables obtained from EUROSTAT. For a deeper analyses of the obtained results, we formulated three assumptions, which have been tested with the use of several statistical methods—Pearson’s correlation coefficient, linear regression, the distance from a fictitious object method, and hierarchical clustering. Our results show that the amount of food wasted in different sectors (retail, food, households) is not correlated, and any of the analyzed socioeconomic variables do not influence the ranking of countries by the crucial variable.