This research aims at shedding empirical light on the relative efficiency of small-scale maize producers in Romania. Farmers in transition countries still face heavily distorted price systems resulting from imperfect market conditions and socioeconomic and institutional constraints. To capture such distortions we formulate a stochastic shadow-cost frontier model to investigate the systematic input-specific allocative inefficiency. We further adjust the underlying cost frontier by incorporating shadow price corrections and subsequently reveal evidence on farm specific technical inefficiency. Different models are estimated due to the imposition of curvature correctness and the effects on the individual efficiency estimates are shown. The empirical results show a relative high technical efficiency of the small-scale farmers but relatively poor scores on systematic input price efficiency. The usage of extension services as well as agricultural training on the farm level are found to have a positive effect on the technical efficiency level of the farms. All model specifications further agree on the negative effect on efficiency with respect to the use of insecticides. The imposition of functional concavity on the shadow cost frontier leads to relative differences in the efficiency estimates of up to 240%.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: