Impact of off-farm activities on technical efficiency: evidence from maize producers of eastern Ethiopia

Ahmed Ahmed and Kumilachew Alamerie Melesse ()
Additional contact information
Kumilachew Alamerie Melesse: Haramaya University

Agricultural and Food Economics, 2018, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-15

Abstract: Abstract This article analyzes the impact of participation in off-farm activities on technical efficiency of maize production in eastern Ethiopia. We combined propensity score matching with a stochastic production frontier model that corrects sample selection bias resulting from unobserved factors that potentially affect both households’ decision to participate in off-farm activities and technical efficiency scores that most previous studies do not account for. The probit model results indicate that sex of the household head, literacy of the spouse, agricultural cooperative membership, family size, and access to market information had significant effect on farmers’ participation in off-farm activities. In the meantime, it was found that farmers who participated in off-farm activities have a significant technical efficiency gain compared with their non-participant counterparts.

Keywords: Off-farm; Technical efficiency; Stochastic frontiers; PSM; Selection bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1186/s40100-018-0098-0 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:agfoec:v:6:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1186_s40100-018-0098-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... nomics/journal/40100

DOI: 10.1186/s40100-018-0098-0

Access Statistics for this article

Agricultural and Food Economics is currently edited by Alessandro Banterle, Liesbeth Dries, Andrea Marchini and Carlo Russo

More articles in Agricultural and Food Economics from Springer, Italian Society of Agricultural Economics (SIDEA) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().