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...

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...

In this paper, we present a nonparametric comparative efficiency analysis of 179 communal public transport bus companies in Germany (1990-2004). We apply both deterministic data envelopment analysis (DEA) and bootstrapping to test the robustness of our estimates and to test the hypothesis of...

A steep decline in coffee prices at the producer level led to considerable pressure for farmers in Costa Rica and producer countries all over the world. One possible reaction was moving to specialty markets, where price pressure was perceived to be lower. We use original survey data from 2002/03...

A detailed decomposition of the sources of the Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth index within an output distance function framework was carried out, looking at the following components: technical change, change in technical efficiency, scale component, and violations of the profit...