The paper investigates the impact of subsidies and of para-agriculture on the technical efficiency of organic farms in Switzerland, Austria and Southern Germany. The data-set consists of bookkeeping data with 1,704 observations in the years 2003 to 2005. Technical efficiency is modelled using a...

This paper provides an empirical demonstration for a practical approach of efficiency evaluation against the background of limited data availability in some regulated industries. Here, traditional DEA may result in a lack of discriminatory power when high numbers of variables but only limited...

Efforts undertaken by France to restructure the allocation of governmental competencies increased the importance of subnational governments by transferring additional tasks. This paper analyzes the efficiency of public spending on an intermediate government level for a sample of 96 départements...

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...

Benchmarking methods are widely used in the regulation of firms in network industries working under heterogeneous exogenous environments. In this paper we compare three recently developed estimators, namely conditional DEA (Daraio and Simar, 2005, 2007b), latent class SFA (Orea and Kumbhakar, 2004;...

Nonparametric efficiency analysis has become a widely applied technique to support industrial benchmarking as well as a variety of incentive-based regulation policies. In practice such exercises are often plagued by incomplete knowledge about the correct specifications of inputs and outputs....

Production analysis matters in agricultural economics because technology shapes developments in agriculture as well as in related sectors, such as the food industry. Pro- ductivity and technical efficiency (TE) are key aspects in this context. In empirical analysis, inefficiency can be...

As the Argentinean grapevine production systems have gained global visibility, the wine industry has been revitalized with a greater focus on enological quality, technology adoption, and export orientation. Although grapevine production has decreased 36% in a decade nationwide, the province of...