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...

The paper investigates the impact of subsidies and of para-agriculture on the technical efficiency of organic farms in Switzerland, Austria and Southern Germany. The data-set consists of bookkeeping data with 1,704 observations in the years 2003 to 2005. Technical efficiency is modelled using a...

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...

Supermarkets and high-value exports are currently 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 farming efficiency have hardly been studied. Using a survey of Kenyan vegetable growers...

Do transgenic crops cause agrobiodiversity erosion? We hypothesize that they increase productivity and reduce production risk and may therefore reduce farmer demand for on-farm varietal diversity, especially when only a few transgenic varieties are available. We also hypothesize that varietal...

A steep decline in coffee prices at the producer level led to considerable pressure for farmers in Costa Rica and producer countries all over the world. One possible reaction was moving to specialty markets, where price pressure was perceived to be lower. We use original survey data from 2002/03...

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, it compares the performance of various panel data models in estimating technical efficiency in production. Second, it applies various stochastic frontier panel data models to estimate the technical efficiency of Iran's cotton production and to...

This paper addresses the apparent paradox between widespread support of cattle farming by agricultural policy interventions and negative returns to cattle as stressed in recent works. Using a representative panel dataset for Andhra Pradesh, a state in the south of India, we examine average and...

This paper applies the concept of damage coefficients introduced in Houba and Kremers (2008) to provide an estimate of the cost of climate change - in particular the cost of changes in mean regional temperature and precipitation - to the fruit vegetation sector. We concentrate on the production...

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...