How efficient is maize production among smallholder farmers in Zimbabwe? A comparison of semiparametric and parametric frontier efficiency analyses

Xiaoli Etienne, Giancarlo Ferrara and Douglas Mugabe

Applied Economics, 2019, vol. 51, issue 26, 2855-2871

Abstract: The controversial Fast Track Land Reform Programme in Zimbabwe that redistributes commercially-owned farmland to smallholder households has caused concerns about the efficiency of agricultural production in the country. In this paper, we estimate the efficiency of resource use among smallholder farmers in Zimbabwe when producing maize, the staple crop in the country. Using both a semiparametric model and a fully parametric stochastic frontier model, we find significant production shortfalls for smallholder maize production. While labor, capital, and land all significantly affect the total output, the estimated mean efficiency score for farms with less than 10 hectares of land (A1) appears to be under 0.75, and for the entire sample (A1 and A2) it ranges between 0.595 and 0.772. There clearly exists a great potential for maize farmers to improve the technical efficiency and increase the total output. Gender and age of the household head, access to extension services, and activities of other crops significantly affect the technical efficiency of smallholder maize production in Zimbabwe. We also find that all farms operate under increasing returns to scale and that the technical efficiency score tends to increase with the level of output.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00036846.2018.1558363 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:applec:v:51:y:2019:i:26:p:2855-2871

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20

DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2018.1558363

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().