This article attempts to integrate the production- and the efficiency-based approaches for evaluating the impact of extension on farms' performance. For this purpose the nonneutral production frontier model is used, and the empirical analysis refers to a sample of farms from Crete, Greece. The empirical results support the proposed formulation instead of either the production- or the efficiency-based formulations as extension was found to have a statistically significant effect on closing both the technology and management gaps. Public and private extension services were found to be competitive in the production function and complementary in the technical inefficiency effect function. In addition, farms using both public and private extension services achieved a higher degree of technical efficiency than those using either public or private extension services, and farms with no extension services were found to be the least efficient. Copyright 2007 International Association of Agricultural Economists.

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Malmquist productivity index, Stochastic input distance function, Greek aquaculture farms, C23, D24, Q22,

This article proposes a tractable approach for analyzing the sources of TFP changes (i.e., technical change, changes in technical and allocative inefficiency, and the scale effect) in a multi‐output setting, while retaining the single‐equation nature of the econometric procedure used to estimate the parameters of the underlying technology. The proposed approach relies on Bauer's cost function‐based decomposition of TFP changes and the duality between input distance and cost functions. The empirical results are based on a sample of 121 UK livestock farms observed over the period 1983–92 and a translog input distance function.