Influenced by the legacy of command economies, the recent agricultural cooperation in Central and Eastern Europe is, compared to EU countries, marked by a different pattern. Based on simplified ownership incentive approach, this paper distinguishes between the fundamental features of communist,...

We analyse how the aggregation of production processes affects efficiency evaluations. A production unit can be inefficient even though all its production processes are efficient. We show how to test if observed "inefficiencies" may be caused by an aggregation and how to correct efficiency...

Super efficiency evaluations are introduced along the lines of the potential improvements approach in Bogetoft and Hougaard (1999). Both a reference selection and a related super efficiency index is defined. The new (potential slack) super efficiency index is compared to a Farrell-based super...

The development of a third world country requires a conscious balance between different planning and policy issues, such as population growth rate, gross national income, self reliance and long-term sustainable ecological development. This paper reports on a cross-disciplinary project to design...

This paper compares emissions trading based on an absolute cap, denoted permit trading, with a scheme based on relative standards, denoted credit trading, under both perfect and imperfect competition. I show that credit trading is an inefficient instrument and that the two schemes have a...

When it comes down to reality the political objective of securing reasonable income to farmers succeeds all other objectives in agricultural policy making. To be able to evaluate policy and design new policy it is of vital importance to know the overall income situation and how the agricultural...

This paper presents the results of an empirical analysis of technological change and economies of scale in Danish agriculture. The estimation is based on a multi-output, multi-input translog cost function and covers the period 1973-1995. The results show that technological change varied...

We introduce simple non-parametric models to estimate the potential gains from merging production units. Three effects are distinguished. A merger may affect technical efficiency. It also affects the size of the operation which may or may not be advantageous depending on the return to scale...

We consider how to organize the processing and marketing of an agricultural product when farming costs are known only by the individual farmers. We show that when marginal costs are un-correlated and the market for final goods is competitive, the socially optimal production levels may be...

Low levels of public goods provision in many developing countries’ rural communities often force the poor to approach someone with considerable command over both financial and social resources to act as their patron. However engaging with the patron – typically a landlord – does not...