A NON PARAMETRIC APPROACH FOR THE STUDY OF INSPECTIONS IN THE AGRIBUSINESS PRODUCTION

The present study concerns the analysis of the inspections (and eventual disputes) during the controls in agribusiness industry, assessed by the ICQ on the entire national territory, during the period 1997-2006. The research was carried out on the available data according year and sector. In particular the examined sectors considered were: dairy production, feed and integrators, eggs, honey and meat. First of all, we have calculated the "dispute rates", dividing the number of disputes to the total number of inspection visits for each sector and year. In this way, we focused our attention both on the temporal variations of the dispute rates occurred in the years and on the comparison of the different production sectors. We used a nonparametric approach, since there is not a guarantee of having asymptotically valid results: in particular we applied the Cox and Stuart test for trend, the NPC test and NPC Ranking.