Merchants formed an important component of British foreign direct investment before 1945. Locating in parts of Asia, Latin America and other developing economies, they often diversified into non-trading activities, including the ownership of plantations. This article examines three such British...

In a production technology, the type of returns to scale (RTS) associated with an efficient decision making unit (DMU) is indicative of the direction of marginal rescaling that the DMU should undertake in order to improve its productivity. In this paper a concept of global returns to scale (GRS)...

This paper analyzes the productivity of farms across 370 municipalities in the Center-West region of Brazil. A stochastic frontier model with a latent spatial structure is proposed to account for possible unknown geographical variation of the outputs. The paper compares versions of the model...