Using empirical data from a nationally representative farm household survey in Senegal, this study evaluated the impact of different risk management strategies employed by farm households on technical efficiency (TE). The findings of the study suggest that risk management has implications for...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the regional productivity differentials on dairy farms in Denmark, Finland and Sweden. Several methods have been suggested for analysing productivity differentials in agriculture between groups of farms or countries. Hayami [5] and Hayami and Ruttan [7]...

This paper explores the operational and market efficiencies of various biotechnological company formats in Taiwan during the period 2006 to 2008 by adopting the two-stage directional distance function and the meta-frontier concept. It conducts an efficiency assessment by taking into account a...

The growing importance attached to education as a key factor to improve economic performance coupled with the persistent scarcity of resources for education makes it important that skills and literacy are produced efficiently. This paper provides an international comparison of the efficiency of...

This paper compares the organic and conventional citriculture systems in Spain from the perspective of their technical efficiency. The efficiency of the two growing systems is compared in relation to a metafrontier that envelops both technologies in order to identify the limitations each farming...

This paper constructs an innovative ratio of meta-technology cost (MTCR) by combining the meta-frontier framework and shadow price model. This ratio is not only an indicator to account for country-specific technology heterogeneity or technology heterogeneity across a group of countries to...

Supermarkets 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. Productivity effects in previous studies are also estimated with...

To address challenges for the 21st century, the Chinese government initiated a series of higher education reforms to support the open-door policy of China. Part of the education reform involves an allocation of additional funding of US$ 20 billion to a group of 112 universities to strengthen...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and compare the efficiency ratios and the technological gaps of banking industries in seven countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Design/methodology/approach The meta-frontier model was used to evaluate efficiency across...