abstractgiven the importance of the notion of efficiency in the country's economic growth, measuring the efficiency and the technology gap for various industries in order to achieve the best possible resource assignment, following the declared policy goals, is of particular importance for those countries, such as iran, which are now at the early stages of the industrialization process. hen...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the levels of technical efficiency in agricultural sector of MENA countries by using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) approaches in 2007-2008. The results show that the total average of technical efficiency is as follows: DEABCC(0.770)>DEACCR(0.744)>SFA(0.479), and among all MENA countries, the best performanc...

in this study, farm level technical efficiency (te) and its determinants were investigated. a stochastic cobb-douglas (cd) production frontier was used to provide estimates of input-oriented te for a sample of 100 rain fed farms in two palestinian governorates. empirical findings showed that the estimated te of the farms in the pooled sample ranged from 35.7 to 95.6%, with a mean value of 72.2%...

In this paper, we test for productivity gains resulting from the introduction of a productivity-based incentive program in a large manufacturing plant of a Fortune 500 corporation. We develop a methodology based on a stochastic nonparametric frontier estimation technique to evaluate productivity in the postincentive plan period relative to the pre-incentive plan period. We also test for product...

The field of production frontier estimation is divided between the parametric Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) and the deterministic, nonparametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). This paper explores an amalgam of DEA and SFA that melds a nonparametric frontier with a stochastic composite error. Our model imposes the standard SFA assumptions for the inefficiency and noise terms. The frontier...

Stochastic nonparametric envelopment of data (StoNED) combines the virtues of data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) into a unified framework of frontier estimation. StoNED melds the nonparametric piece-wise linear DEA-type frontier with stochastic SFA-type inefficiency and noise terms. We show that the StoNED model can be estimated in the panel data setting in a...

Environmental performance of the U.S. States is investigated for the period of 1990 – 2007 using Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA). The SFA accounts for both efficiency measure and stochastic noise affecting a frontier. The frontier is formed using indicators of GDP, energy consumption, population, and CO2 emissions. For comparability, all indicators are expressed as ratios to total. Statistic...