Is extension an effective tool for increasing social welfare? The objective of this study is to evaluate the feasibility of farmer financial participation in extension as an alternative to increase its efficiency. While extension costs have been high, the impact at farmers' welfare has not...

The form and content of decentralization has dominated development discourse and public sector reform agenda in Kenya in the last two decades. The case of agricultural extension service presents decentralization in a difficult context partly due to lack of information on its possible diverse...

Increasing land degradation and concomitant low agricultural productivity are important determinants of rural poverty in the hillside areas of Honduras. Using data at the levels of the farm household, parcel and plot, we develop an econometric modeling framework to analyze land management...

Recent low estimates of total factor productivity change for wool producers in the Australian sheep industry indicate that they are struggling to improve their performance. This evidence is at odds with the views of many technical observers of industry performance, prompting us to re-estimate...

This study contributes to the agricultural productivity literature in developing countries and Nigeria especially by quantifying the level of efficiency for sample of rice farmers from North Central Zone of Nigeria. A stochastic efficiency decomposition frontier analysis was used to derive...

A time series model is estimated to identify the interrelation among prices on the international and the EU domestic market for butter. Although the findings were not derived from a causal model, the inspection of the data provides economically reasonable and important insights in structural...

Economic reform in the Central and Eastern European countries in the 1980s helped transform the structure and volume of agricultural production, consumption and trade, and resulted in significant agricultural productivity improvements. However, there are large differences among the transition...

The impact of fanya juu bunds on productivity in a high rainfall area in the Ethiopian highlands is analyzed based on data from a cross section household survey with multiple plot observations per household. The results from parametric and non-parametric analysis indicated that productivity from...

Despite having the second largest livestock population in Africa and favorable climate, the contribution of the livestock, especially the dairy sector to the Ethiopian economy is minimal. The per capita consumption of dairy products of 16 liters is one of the lowest in the world. With increasing...

This article proposes an extended three-stage DEA methodology similar to Fried et al. (2002) to improve the measurement of productivity growth then the assumption of free disposability of undesirable outpu t does not apply. A directional distance function is used to construct adjusted...