Economic reform in China helped transform the structure and volume of agricultural production and resulted in significant changes in efficiency and productivity. This article measures agricultural technical efficiency (TE) and total factor productivity (TFP) in China by including all producers in different groups operating under their own technologies. A metafrontier function approach is applied using a panel data set on 28 provinces during 1991-2005. The provinces are categorised into advanced and low-technology provinces. Based on the metafrontier estimation, TFP growth is decomposed into TE change (TEC), technical change (TC) and scale efficiency change (SEC). Our major findings indicate that TC contributed most to Chinese agricultural TFP growth throughout the period of study. SEC and TEC exhibited negative effects on TFP growth for the advanced and low-technology provinces respectively. Most of the advanced-technology provinces exhibited higher TE than the low-technology provinces. The comparatively low TE scores in the low-technology provinces imply that the low-technology provinces were operating far from the metafrontier. The results also show that labour and fertiliser still make important contributions to output, and thus improving the quality of farmers and applying modern physical inputs is also crucial to TFP growth.

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This study examines the relative technical efficiency of mixed crop-livestock farming systems and assesses their economic performance between the Upper and Delta regions of Egypt. A non-parametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) method is empirically applied for measuring technical efficiency using farm-level data for 838 mixed crop-livestock farmers. The findings show that the mixed crop-livestock farms in Egypt are operating at a low level of technical efficiency, indicating most farms are unable to catch up with the current production frontier and existing production technologies. Farms in the Delta region perform slightly better than those farms in Upper Egypt. Results also suggest that technical efficiency improvement is positively affected by farmers’ education, having a farm milk production certificate, and being located in the Delta region, whereas farm size negatively affects the economic performance of mixed crop-livestock farming systems in Egypt. ,,

This paper aims to understand the state of adjustment process and dynamic structure in Polish agriculture. A dynamic cost frontier model using the shadow cost approach is formulated to decompose cost efficiency into allocative and technical efficiencies. The dynamic cost efficiency model is developed into a more general context with a multiple quasi-fixed factor case. The model is implemented empirically using a panel data set of 1,143 Polish farms over the period 2004 to 2007. Due to the regional disparities and a wide variety of farm specialization, farms are categorized into two regions and five types of farm production specialization. The estimation results confirm our observation that adjustment is rather sluggish implying that adjustment cost are considerably high. It takes up to 30 years until Polish farmers reach their optimal level of capital and land input. Allocative and technical efficiency differ widely across regions. Moreover, efficiency is rather stable over time and among farm specialisations. However, their results indicate that the regions characterized by the larger farms perform slightly better.