Supermarkets are gaining ground in the agri-food systems of many developing countries. While recent research has analyzed income effects in the small farm sector, impacts on productivity and efficiency have hardly been studied. We use a meta-frontier approach and combine this with propensity...

In the year 2000, the government of Zimbabwe launched the Fast Track Land Reform Program (FTLRP) as part of its ongoing land reform and resettlement program. It seeks to address the racially skewed land distribution pattern inherited at independence in 1980. This paper used data on beneficiaries...

The investment decisions of small-scale farmers in developing countries are conditioned by their financial environment. Binding credit market constraints and incomplete insurance can reduce investment in activities with high expected profits. We conducted several experiments in northern Ghana in...

The Lithuanian agricultural sector still features the processes of land reform, farm structure development, and modernisation. Accordingly, there is a need to utilise the benchmarking techniques in order to fathom the underlying trends and sources of efficiency and productivity. This paper...

Crop rotations are known to have two main kinds of economic effects: direct effects on potential yields and on the productivity of different inputs, and indirect effects on economically optimal input levels, especially pesticides and fertilizers. The main objective of this article is to uncover...

Analysis (DEA) have become very popular in the analysis of productive efficiency. This paper undertakes a comparison of the SFA and the constant returns to scale (CRS) and variable returns to scale (VRS) output-oriented DEA models, based on a sample of 165 dairy farms in Greece. However, the aim...

In this paper, we present a theoretical model for adjustment costs and investment utilisation that illustrates their causes and types and shows in which phases of an investment they occur. Furthermore, we develop an empirical framework for analysing the size and the timing of adjustment costs...

We investigate and compare the suitability of parametric and non-parametric stochastic regression methods for analysing production technologies and the optimal firm size. Our theoretical analysis shows that the most commonly used functional forms in empirical production analysis, Cobb-Douglas...

We discuss nonparametric regression models for panel data. A fully nonparametric panel data specification that uses the time variable and the individual identifier as additional (categorical) explanatory variables is considered to be the most suitable. We use this estimator and conventional...

We apply nonparametric panel data kernel regression to investigate production risk, out-put price uncertainty, and risk attitudes of Polish dairy farms based on a firm-level unbalanced panel data set that covers the period 2004–2010. We compare different model specifications and different...