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The state government of Western Australia has suggested there are economies of scale in local government service delivery and that council amalgamations would allow substantial efficiencies to be realised. In this article, the Data Envelopment Analysis method is used to measure efficiency at 98 local councils in Western Australia in 2009 and 2010. Although many councils were found to be operating under increasing returns to scale, many others were found to be operating under decreasing returns to scale. This suggests there is room for either scaling down or expanding for some local councils to achieve optimal scale.

Farming activities are often financed using debt, yet empirical studies investigating the relationship between farm debt structure and performance are still rare. Using a 10 year unbalanced panel of Broadacre farms in Western Australia, we relate the impact of long-term debt, short-term debt and tax liability on farm performance measured by input-oriented technical efficiency and return on assets. We find farm technical efficiency is positively related to short-term debt, tax liability and capital investment, but negatively related to off-farm income generating activities. Long-term debt has no effect on production efficiency and return on assets. These results are robust to both parametric and nonparametric methods of estimation.

In this article, we used bootstrap data envelopment analysis techniques to examine technical and scale efficiency scores for a balanced panel of 564 farms in Kansas for the period 1993-2007. The production technology is estimated under three different assumptions of returns to scale and the results are compared. Technical and scale efficiency is disaggregated by farm size and specialization. Our results suggest that farms are both scale and technically inefficient. On average, technical efficiency has deteriorated over the sample period. Technical efficiency varies directly by farm size and the differences are significant. Differences across farm specializations are not significant.