In this paper, we assess the potential for rehabilitation of comparative analysis under its new guise of benchmarking. After a brief description of comparative analysis, we discuss the deficiencies that surrounded its fall in reputation: neglect of economic principles, limited scope for action,...

The costs and benefits of policies designed to regulate the use of production contracts will depend in part on the impact of these contracts on farm productivity. In this paper we measure the impact of contracting on 1) partial and total factor productivity and 2) the production technology for...

A decomposition model has been used to measure sources of individual and aggregate crop output growth between 1967-70 and 1981-84. Growth in output has been attributed to changes in area, yield and area-yield interaction and the area effect has been further attributed to changes in net area,...

Discusses the constraints for employment expansion along with diffusion of improved technology, measures employment elasticity of output growth, and suggest solutions.

Based on secondary data and field surveys, analyses the economic roles of the livestock sectors, technological and policy constraints for livestock development and policy options for the future development.

Most analyses of technical efficiency and productivity focus on the activities of firms or institutions using inputs to produce outputs. In this paper, we report the results of an efficiency analysis that is couched in a different context. We analyse the efficiency with which physical...

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...

Using panel data, we estimate technology gaps for four distinct sheep-producing regions in Eastern Australia (Northern New South Wales, Central and South-Eastern New South Wales, South-Western New South Wales and South-West Victoria) that reflect spatial environmental and technological...

Since the 1970s, the policy of Indian government has been to promote dairy development on the basis of the cooperative organisations. During the 1990s the dairy industry in India was liberalised. This study examines the impact of the liberalisation policy on the cooperative dairy plants in...

Estimating how production contracts affect farm productivity is difficult because the decision to use a contract is endogenous to other decisions affecting productivity. This study uses the local availability of production contracts as an instrument for whether a farm uses a contract in order to...