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The main objective of this study is to measure technical change and total factor productivity in the Tunisian manufacturing sector using the Malmquist index approach. Applying non-parametric frontiers techniques, we found that total factor productivity is decomposed on the basis of the technical efficiency variation and technological change for six manufacturing sectors. The results indicate that most sectors had very poor performance in terms of technological progress rate. In addition, any efficiency gain was proved to be, in large part, due to the improvement of technical rather than scale efficiency. Moreover, the total factor productivity improvement achieved, at an average rate of 1.93 per cent per year for the whole of the sample, is mainly due to the agricultural, food and chemical industries.

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The fundamental idea of this article is to study the efficiency of the Togolese agriculture and its relationship with economic growth on the basis of economies of scale. We tackled efficiency, in its input and output orientations, using parametric and non-parametric methods in which an annual product analysis is carried out. In this context, agriculture is modelled by the usual Translog and Cobb-Douglas functions and efficiency estimating techniques, such as the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and data envelopment analysis (DEA). Agricultural production was analyzed on a product basis depending on the cultivated area and the number of workers in the agricultural field. The study sample consists of 15 agricultural products for the period running from 1990 to 2009. The Togolese agriculture is generally inefficient according to the DEA and SFA methods.