In this article we explore some issues surrounding the use of farm‐level efficiency and productivity estimates for benchmarking studies. Using an eight‐year balanced panel of Victorian wool producers we analyse annual variation between estimates of farm‐level technical efficiency derived...

The major objective of this paper is to examine the association between agricultural subsidies and farm efficiency using data from the European Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) for operations specializing on dairy. The analysis covers the 18 year period going from 1990 to 2007 and includes...

A meta-analysis is perfonned to review empirical estimates of technical efficiency (TE) in developing country agriculture. The objective of the study is to contribute to a better understanding of the factors that influence estimates of mean TE. A data set of 51 observations of TE from 32 studies...

In this paper we use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to estimate technical efficiency for a sample of 1742 Australian dairy farms. Bearing in mind data limitations we find that average technical efficiency is 59 per cent, but there are significant regional differences. These results reflect...

Productivity gaps of 321 groundnut farmers from Uganda and Kenya were analyzed based on data from the 2009 growing seasons, using the stochastic production frontier model of Battese and Coelli (1995). Productivity gaps associated with the use of improved versus local seed varieties, with the...