The measurement of productivity fluctuations has been the focus of decades-long interest. In addition to broad structural forces driving productivity changes, there is more recent interest in measuring and identifying the heterogeneous forces driving these changes. A major force is...

Increasing worldwide energy demand and diminishing supplies of fossil fuels have necessitated the development and increasing use of new sustainable energy sources, as well as more parsimonious energy use. In the context of agriculture, research has focused predominantly on the production of...

We analyze the evolution of Sub-Saharan Africa’s agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) over the past 45 years, looking for evidence of recent changes in growth patterns using an improved nonparametric Malmquist index. Our TFP estimates show a remarkable recovery in the performance of...

This research carries out a technical efficiency assessment for a small-scale fishery in Mexico. Technical efficiency (TE) is measured as the deviation of the firm (i.e. fisher) production from the best practice production frontier (Kumbhakar and Lovell 2000). Under TE, fishing production is...

General circulation models predict significant and accelerating changes in local patterns of precipitation and temperature over the next century. The vulnerability of agriculture to climate change will depend on both the biophysical impacts of climate change on crop yields and on the...

This paper studies the effect of local off-farm employment and migration on rural households’ technical efficiency of crop production using a five-year panel dataset from more than 2,000 households in five Chinese provinces. While there is not much debate about the positive contribution of...

The present study uses local maximum likelihood (LML) methods recently proposed by Kumbhakar et al. (2007) to assess the technical efficiency of arable crop Kansas farms. LML techniques overcome the most relevant limitations associated to mainstream parametric stochastic frontier models. Results...

Bt cotton has been cultivated in China for the past 10 years. Limitations of previous studies analyzing the impact of this technology are the short time period considered and lack of panel data. In this paper, we present findings from monitoring 150 Bt cotton farmers in 2002 and 2005....