An attempt was made to determine the overall farm-specific technical efficiency or inefficiency of onion farms of Bangladesh. Farm-level data were used for the estimation of the parameters of Cobb-Douglas stochastic frontier production function. The model for technical inefficiency effects in the stochastic frontier included age, experience, education, and farm size. The elasticity of output wi...

The study was aimed at analysing the technical efficiency in maize production of smallholder farmers in central rift valley of Ethiopia. Cross sectional data from 138 maize producer farmers were collected during 2011/12 production season. The estimated results of the Cobb-Douglas frontier model with inefficiency variables shows that the mean technical efficiency of the farmers in the production...

BACKGROUND Zambia has recently articulated an ambitious national health program designed to meeting health-related MDGs. Public expectations are high and Zambia continues to receive significant resources from global and bilateral donors to support its health agenda. Although the lack of adequate resources presents the most important constraint, the efficiency with which available resources are ...

In this paper we compare estimates of technical efficiency for a cross-section of Australian dairy farms using various frontier methodologies; Bayesian and Classical stochastic frontiers, and Data Envelopment Analysis. We find that our Bayesian stochastic frontier estimates, when we impose monotonicity and curvature restrictions at all data points, significantly impact on our parameter estimate...

Shrimp aquaculture is playing a vital role in Malaysian agriculture, especially its increasing contribution to economic growth. White shrimp aquaculture is not only the key player in brackish water shrimp aquaculture but also the largest contributor to Malaysian shrimp aquaculture. This study estimates technical efficiency and investigates factors affecting technical inefficiency of Malaysian w...

We analyze the operational performance of 202 Turkish rural general hospitals. To help improve performance on both input and output space, we adopt a directional distance approach. We treat a mortality based measure as a “needs indicator”. We derive pure technical, scale and output congestion inefficiency measures and show how they vary across size classes. We show that “reducing mortality” inv...

The mathematical programming technique Data Envelopment Analysis is used to test the hypothesis of Averch and Johnson that utility regulation leads to overuse of capital. The regulated firm earns a return s greater than its cost of capital r, an implicit capital subsidy resulting in allocative inefficiency. Technical and Allocative inefficiency are based on Cost and Production Frontiers from 33...