Rice is an important staple food in many developing countries, especially in Senegal. However, rice production in Senegal only meet 20% of the domestic demand largely due to the poor performance of rice farmers and low productivity. Access to agricultural credit has strong impacts on the technical efficiency of farmers and would promote inputs and new technology adoption. But that is not clear enough in previous studies. This study investigates the impact of agricultural credit access on rice productivity and technical efficiency with 260 random sampled rice farmers from Anambe basin in Senegal. The Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) was adopted to estimate the technical efficiency. The results indicate that the inputs of rice production, including labor, pesticide, herbicides and fertilizer, have significant impacts on rice productivity. Furthermore, the results present that the average efficiency is of 0.813 and the inefficiency estimation model reveals that the influences of agricultural credit access, gender, education, ethnicity, use of improved seed and land tenure system on technical inefficiency of rice production are significant. Particularly, for the access to agricultural credit, rice farmers without agricultural credit would get 3.8% higher production inefficiency. The farmers with access to credit yield 37.32% higher rice production than their counterparts. Therefore, our study provides strong empirical evidence to promote agricultural credit in rice production.

Since war started at the end of 2001, the economy was severely devasted in Afghanistan, especially for the agriculture sector. Maize is the third most important cereal crop in Afghanistan, but the productivity of maize has a declining trend which may be caused by low efficiency of maize farmers nowadays. This study examines the production efficiency of maize producers and its important factors with the cross-sectional data form a multi-stage sampling survey of 250 maize producers in Helmand province in 2019. With the adoption of stochastic production frontier (SPF) model and production cost function, the paper gets the estimations of the average technical efficiency (0.737), allocative efficiency (0.65) and economic efficiency (0.568). The inputs, including land, labor, seed, fertilizer and pesticide/weedicides, have significant impacts on maize production and most of the farms exhibit an increasing return to scales. In addition, Tobit regression was applied to identify the influential factors of the production efficiencies for maize producers and the results indicate that education, family size, farm size, farming experience, contact to extension services and access to credit have significantly influence on the efficiency level. Finally, the study suggests that government should take some initiatives, such as extending the agricultural extension service, ensuring supply of high quality seeds and sufficient fertilizer with affordable prices and economical provision of mobile internet facility in remote areas, which will enhance the productivity and efficiency of the farmers and ultimately boost up their economic welfare and livelihood.