Technical Efficiency in Nuts-2 Regions in the Agricultural Sector in Turkey: A Data Envelopment Analysis Application

Increasing agricultural efficiency and productivity is a crucial policy goal in most developing countries, as it is one of the main sources of overall growth. Technical efficiency is widely used to determine the performance of production units. For this reason, many studies have been carried out on efficiency, especially in health, education, and agriculture. In this study, the technical efficiencies of the regions were calculated using a non-parametric method, Data Envelopment Analysis. In the analysis, the total plant and animal production values were taken as output, an agricultural area, agricultural employment, amount of fertilizer used, number of tractors, and livestock unit corresponding to the number of animals were taken as inputs. In the study, data from 2015 to 2019 across five years were used. 26 level-2 regions were classified as decision making units, and their technical efficiency values were determined. The data for this study were obtained from the Turkish Statistical Institute and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry database. In the input-oriented analysis, according to the years' average, the mean of technical efficiency was 77.5% and 87.7%, respectively, under the assumption of constant returns to scale (CRS) and variable returns to scale (VRS). Both under the assumption of CRS and VRS, TR61, TR62, TR90 and TRC3 regions were determined to be fully effective. The regions with the lowest technical efficiency were TR33, TR82, TR72, TR10, and TR83 under the CRS assumption, while TR33, TR72, TR83, TR32, and TR42 under the VRS assumption. In the five years, there was a 6.10% decrease in the CRS assumption and 2.24% in the VRS assumption in technical efficiency ratios of the regions.