Economic reform in China helped transform the structure and volume of agricultural production and resulted in significant changes in efficiency and productivity. This paper measures agricultural technical efficiency (TE) and total factor productivity (TFP) in China by allowing producers...

Technical change in general milk processing is estimated within a homothetic frontier production function allowing neutrally variable scale elasticity. The results show that technical progress is characterized by a rapid increase in optimal scale and a small capital saving bias, increasing the...

This paper is concerned with the measurement of productive efficiency. Farrell's measures of efficiency are generalized to nonhomogeneous production functions. Several new measures of efficiency have been introduced and applied to the Swedish milk processing industry. The empirical analysis is...

Low adoption of productive agricultural technologies is a puzzle. Agricultural extension services rely on external agents to communicate with farmers, although social networks are known to be the most credible source of information about new technologies. We conduct a large-scale field...

Farmers in developing countries often lack access to timely and reliable information about modern technologies that are essential to improve agricultural productivity. The recent diffusion of mobile phones has the potential to overcome these barriers by making information available to those...

This paper presents a novel agent-based model of land use and technological change in the agricultural sector under environmental boundaries, finite available resources and changing land productivity. In particular, we model a spatially explicit economy populated by boundedly-rational farmers...

This study combines three rounds of surveys with remote sensing to measure long-term impacts of a randomized irrigation program in the Dominican Republic. Specifically, Landsat 7 and Landsat 8 satellite images are used to measure the causal effects of the program on agricultural productivity,...

Economic theory and econometric evidence support the thesis that the displacement of government expenditures on public goods by subsidies to private goods inhibits the performance of the farm sector. This paper presents an analysis of the influence of the mix of expenditures related to...

La teoría económica y la evidencia empírica disponible apoyan la tesis de que el direccionamiento del gasto público hacia bienes de naturaleza privada, en detrimento del gasto en bienes públicos, inhibe el desempeño del sector agrícola. Este trabajo presenta un análisis de la influencia...

Recent technological advances both on the farm and in the lab have made farming more independent form nature than ever before. Arguably, the new and accessible technologies are helping us to better understand and 'manage' nature and thus for first time in history farming is becoming as any other...