Supermarkets are gaining ground in the agri-food systems of many developing countries. While recent research has analyzed income effects in the small farm sector, impacts on productivity and efficiency have hardly been studied. We use a meta-frontier approach and combine this with propensity...

We propose a two-stage procedure for finding realistic benchmarks for nonparametric efficiency analysis. On the first stage the efficient DMUs are figured out by a free disposal hull approach. These benchmarks are directly targeted by directional distance functions and the extent of inefficiency...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a widely used tool to estimate relative efficiencies. However, this methodology encounters issues when between-group comparisons with variable returns of scale (VRS) are of interest. In this specification efficiency scores can be undefined when the projection...

When benchmarking production units by non-parametric methods like data envelopment analysis (DEA), an assumption has to be made about the returns to scale of the underlying technology. Moreover, it is often also relevant to compare the frontiers across samples of producers. Until now, no exact...

Permutation techniques, where one recompute the test statistic over permutations of data, have a long history in statistics and have become increasingly useful as the availability of computational power has increased. Until now, no permutation tests for examining returns to scale assumptions,...

China’s agricultural productivity has achieved remarkable accomplishments in agricultural sector after China’s accession to World Trade Organization (WTO). According to National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBSC), the total meat production in 2018 is 43% more than in 2000, and the total...