This paper provides new estimates of small holder farmers' technical efficiency and its principal determinants using a rural Tigray micro finance survey data collected in 2009. Both descriptive and econometric methods are used. The hypotheses tests confirm the adequacy of Cobb-Douglas over...

Most recent studies are based on benchmarking analysis allowing the measure of company efficiency relatively to a reference performance. Benchmarking is a helpful tool to analyze and promote efficiency in insurance companies. The fast development of X-efficiency notion makes traditional...

The design of environmental spending at the national or local level stands on the concept of subsidiarity and on the theory of fiscal federalism. The main question is, so forth, studying when centralization of a public economic function, such as the protection of the environment, is welfare...

This paper analyses the relationship between exports, innovative activities and size and their effect over firms’ technical efficiency and then over their productivity. The analysis takes, also, into account other variables that could affect productivity as industrial sector, or firms’...

This study examines economic performances and household’s behaviours in multiple crops farming in Vietnam. Smallholder farming systems in Vietnam is being transformed by integration between cash cropping and main food cropping operations. This transformation into diversified farming systems...

In order to take into account the effects of production on the environment and, more generally, the urgency of finding a path of sustainable development many attempts have been made to set productivity growth measurements, including the negative impact of pollution, the production of goods and...

Endogeneity, and the distortions on the estimation of economic models that it causes, is a familiar problem in the econometrics literature. Although non-parametric methods like data envelopment analysis (DEA) are among the most used techniques for measuring technical efficiency, the effects of...

This paper seeks to examine empirically whether foreign banks on an average operate with greater efficiency and so attain higher levels of productivity and profitability. For this purpose, first, a stochastic frontier production function for the banking industry is estimated and bank-wise...

One of the characteristics of the Spanish economy is the high percentage of small and medium-sized firms. Size is one of the factors that condition the managerial organization of the firms and their efficiency and productivity. Moreover size has been found a highly significant variable in...

This paper aims to estimate technical and scale efficiency in the Italian citrus farming. Estimation was carried out from two different approach: a non parametric and a parametric approach using a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model and a Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) model, respectively....