Municipal corporate centres not only perform multiple administrative functions, including supervision, monitoring and budgeting of the overall operation of local government, but also absorb significant resources. From a public policy perspective, it is thus important to determine whether...

We gathered survey data from a random sample of 200 farmer adopters and 59 nonadopters of rice interplanting in Yunnan Province, China in 2000. The data were used to analyze the effect of interplanting on technical efficiency of rice production and to identify the sources of inefficiency, using...

We provide empirical evidence to decompose productivity growth of a group of producers into technical change and efficiency measures at the farm level. Using four years of farm-level data from forty-five grain producers in the low- to medium-rainfall zone of Western Australia, we decompose...

Despite plausible theoretical grounds for presuming a positive relationship between foreign direct investment inflows (FDI) and economic growth, existing empirical evidence on this nexus is inconclusive. In an effort to add to the empirical literature, this paper estimates the relationship...

There have been many previous studies of technical inefficiency in rice production in the Philippines, but none has focused simultaneously on production risk and technical inefficiency at the farm level. Rice production is inherently risky because of the heterogeneous production environment. In...

In recent times the relative economic efficiency of urban water utilities has been neglected as policymakers sought to secure urban water supplies. This paper is an effort to measure the efficiency consequences of a number of recent urban water policy initiatives. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)...

Synergies are reported for mixed-enterprise farming systems in a benchmarking group in the Wheat-Sheep Zone in New South Wales, Australia. A stochastic input distance function is estimated and a measure of synergies is calculated, based on the second cross partial derivative of output variables...

This article reports on an analysis of technical efficiency and environment-technology gaps in wheat farming in Iran. A random sample of 676 farmers was selected from the province of Kerman in 2004. In this study, Kerman is divided into five regions based on climatic and geographical conditions....