This paper measures and compares total factor productivity growth in African agriculture under contemporaneous and sequential technology frontiers over the period 1970–2004. The paper further investigates the sources of agricultural productivity growth using a fixed-effects regression model...

This paper measures the technical, allocative, and economic efficiencies of farmers within and outside the Extension Package Program (EPP) in high and low potential agro-ecological zones in eastern Ethiopia. Within-group farmer efficiencies are analyzed relative to respective technologies to...

This article examines the magnitude and sources of yield variation among adopters of improved cowpea varieties in northern Nigeria promoted through farmer-to-farmer diffusion. The results reveal important efficiency differences between the lead farmers who have contacts with breeders and the...

On the basis of projected economic and poverty impacts of alternative commodity research programs, this article assessed efficiency and equity tradeoffs and the scope for research resource reallocation in Nigeria. Given the importance of major food staples to both poor and nonpoor households in...

Summary This paper assessed the relative economic efficiency and output supply and input demand responses of women farmers in western Kenya. The results showed that women are as technically and allocatively efficient as men. However, neither men nor women have absolute allocative efficiency....

This paper employed a robust stochastic efficiency decomposition technique that accounts for scale effects to derive the technical, allocative, and overall productive efficiency of two samples of farmers, participants and non-participants in the New Extension Program (NEP), in two agro-climatic...

While it is widely recognized that agricultural research is a key driver of broad-based technological change in agriculture that benefits the poor in many different ways, little is known about its aggregate impacts on productivity growth and poverty reduction in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Using a...