Livestock represents 12% of Kenya's economy, and an increase in its efficiency can improve development and reduce poverty. A parametric stochastic frontier model was fitted to a large farm-level cross-sectional data set to estimate the efficiency levels and the underlying sources of the output's departure from the optimal levels. We found that the overall mean efficiency in most of the production frontier models is fairly high (above 51%) and sensitive to the model choice. The main factors that significantly reduce the inefficiency of livestock production are the length of education, gender and age of the household head, offfarm income, land ownership, access to market information and number of livestock technologies adopted. The possible policy options at the disposal of policy-makers are to increase the investment in infrastructural facilities, education and women's and youths' empowerment through capacity building and resource allocation.

Government spending patterns in developing countries have changed dramatically over the last several decades. This paper aims at analysing the relation between government expenditures (GE) and economic growth in Kenya. The study focuses on testing the various versions of Wagner’s hypothesis using Kenya, data from 1967-2012 by an Autoregressive-Distributed Lag (ARDL) model. Overall, we conclude that the Musgrave version is best suited for Kenyan cases since it produced significant long-run and short-run results that were accepted by diagnosis and stability tests. The results rejected Wagner’s hypothesis in Kenya.

During early 1970s and early 1980s economic conditions in general had been favourable for the Kenyan farm sector. Following market liberalization in the late 1980s, farmers and in particular livestock farmers experienced economic hardship. The economic situation facing livestock industry was characterized by wide fluctuation and unpredictability of the livestock and livestock product prices and uncertainity in livestock production and marketing. These shocks coupled with economic conditions in the livestock sector rendered profit-oriented decision-making by livestock farmers and other participants in the industry difficult. The objective of this study was therefore to estimate the livestock products supply responses using an error correction method. The estimators of the model were derived by way of regression and correlation after subjecting the data collected to vigorous testing for stationarity using Augmented Dick-Fuller test. Conclusions were made on the basis of R2 (coefficient of determination) as well as the t statistic. The results indicate that the estimated short run supply function, live cattle and cattle hides were price elastic while sheep and goats were inelastic. The long run supply response was positive although inelastic for live cattle and goats while cattle hide was elastic. The results also showed positive short run price elasticity. On the basis of t-value, the findings were conclusive with all the variables analyzed being statistically significant. The study also found that live cattle and cattle hide supply adjust to equilibrium levels quite fast. These results suggest that livestock farmers in the study area adjust their supply quiet early, probably as soon as they gain the slightest indications that the market signal would be permanent.

Invasion of rangelands by undesirable plant species is one of the challenges facing rangeland productivity and to an extension livestock production in East Africa. They have affected communities in different ways in areas where they grow. Focus group discussions and interviews were held in two sites in pastoral and agro-pastoral regions of Kajiado County to get perceptions of farmers, livestock keepers and other stakeholders concerning the invasive plant species Ipomoea. This was accompanied by visits and field excursions to areas heavily infested by the invader species. The interviewed key informants agreed that the plant has more detrimental effects to the environment, ecologically and to the economy of the region. There is need for urgent interventions involving all stakeholders to curb the spread of the species, which is currently at an unprecedented rate. These include efforts by relevant institutions such as Government, Non-Governmental institutions through mobilization, training and capacity building and demonstrations in order to reverse the trend. Any trainings should however include aspects of recovery of invaded and degraded land primarily through pasture improvement and other interventions as this will enhance the utilization of these areas for increased livestock productivity and reverse degradation.

This article presents a comprehensive review of frontier studies for productivity analysis. The authors discuss the two main frontier approaches and highlight the reasons for selecting the parametric approach. The review also identifies the reason for considering unobserved heterogeneity when estimating firm performance. The classical stochastic frontier model is found to suffer from an empirical artefact in which the residuals of the production function may have positive skewness, contrary to the expected negative skewness which leads to estimated full efficiencies of all firms, as well as the possible problem of collinearity among inputs in the stochastic frontier model. By relaxing the hypotheses of random error symmetry and the independence of the components of the composite error, a sufficiently flexible re-specification of the stochastic frontier model can be achieved by decomposing the third moment of the composite error into three components that include the asymmetry of the inefficiency term, the asymmetry of the random error, and the dependence structure of the error components. Finally, instead of excluding insignificant variables from the model that can be of policy relevance, a principalcomponents-based solution can be adopted for collinearity in a stochastic frontier model.