Assesing the Perspectives of EU Cotton Farming: Technical and Scale Efficiencies of Greek Cotton Growers /доклад на 10 конгрессе ЕААЕ, Exploring Diversity in the European Agri-Food System, Zaragoza, Spain, 28-31 August 2002

Utilizing the stochastic frontier approach, this paper estimates output and input-oriented technical and scale efficiency levels for a sample of cotton-growing farms in Thessaly, Greece. The empirical results suggest that Greek cotton farm operations are technically and scale inefficient. There is a considerable scope for improvement in resource use and thereby in farm income of cotton farms; Greek cotton farmers could reduce production costs by 20.4%, making more efficient utilization of the existing production technology. Factors responsible for the technical efficiency differentials observed among cotton-growers include the farmer’s age and education as well as the farm’s land fragmentation and output specialization.

[1]  R. Kopp.  The Measurement of Productive Efficiency: A Reconsideration , 1981 .

[2]  A. U.S.,et al.  FORMULATION AND ESTIMATION OF STOCHASTIC FRONTIER PRODUCTION FUNCTION MODELS , 2001 .

[3]  Scott E. Atkinson,et al.  Estimation of Output and Input Technical Efficiency Using a Flexible Form and Panel Data , 1994 .

[4]  G. Battese,et al.  Prediction of firm-level technical efficiencies with a generalized frontier production function and panel data , 1988 .

[5]  Calum G. Turvey,et al.  Decomposition Measures of Technical Efficiency for Ontario Dairy Farms , 1990 .

[6]  D. Reifschneider,et al.  SYSTEMATIC DEPARTURES FROM THE FRONTIER: A FRAMEWORK FOR THE ANALYSIS OF FIRM INEFFICIENCY* , 1991 .

[7]  W. Meeusen,et al.  Efficiency Estimation from Cobb-Douglas Production Functions with Composed Error , 1977 .

[8]  N. Kalaitzandonakes.  Price Protection and Productivity Growth , 1994 .

[9]  G. Karagiannis,et al.  To Comply or not to Comply with Policy Regulations - the Case of Greek Cotton Growers: a Note , 2002 .

[10]  W. Greene.  Frontier Production Functions , 1993 .

[11]  Subhash C. Ray,et al.  Measuring Scale Efficiency from a Translog Production Function , 1999 .

[12]  R. Shephard.  Cost and production functions , 1953 .

[13]  C. Lovell,et al.  Econometric Estimation of Technical and Environmental Efficiency: An Application to Dutch Dairy Farms , 1999 .

[14]  S. Kumbhakar,et al.  A Generalized Production Frontier Approach for Estimating Determinants of Inefficiency in U.S. Dairy Farms , 1991 .

[15]  V. Tzouvelekas,et al.  Economic Efficiency in Organic Farming: Evidence from Cotton Farms in Viotia, Greece , 2001, Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics.

[16]  Franz C. Palm,et al.  Wald Criteria for Jointly Testing Equality and Inequality , 1986 .

[17]  G. Debreu.  The Coefficient of Resource Utilization , 1951 .

[18]  Finis Welch,et al.  Education in Production , 1970, Journal of Political Economy.

[19]  G. Battese,et al.  Frontier production functions, technical efficiency and panel data: With application to paddy farmers in India , 1992 .

[20]  G. Battese,et al.  A model for technical inefficiency effects in a stochastic frontier production function for panel data , 1995 .

[21]  R. Stevenson.  Likelihood functions for generalized stochastic frontier estimation , 1980 .