A Comparison of Sfa and Dea Scale Efficiency Estimates: The Case of Greek Fresh Fruits Producers

Estimates of technical and scale inefficiencies of fresh fruits farms in Greece during the period 1991-1995 are obtained by using SFA and DEA. The empirical results confirm previous findings for the frequency distributions and the temporal pattern of technical efficiency. Namely, DEA tends to yield a lower mean and a higher variance distribution of technical efficiency than SFA does, and that both tend to generate the same temporal pattern. On the other hand, the corresponding results regarding the estimates of scale efficiency are rather mixed, without being able to provide a decisive pattern between the estimates obtained from the two approaches.