ESTIMATING PRODUCTION RESPONSE OF BROADACRE FARMS IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA: THE NEXUS OF EMPIRICS AND ECONOMICS REVISITED

Vilaphonh Xayavong and Nazrul Islam

No 60240, 2010 Conference (54th), February 10-12, 2010, Adelaide, Australia from Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society

Abstract: Recently there has been a growing debate as to whether the empirical properties of production response derived from the multi-product framework are consistent with the behavioral assumption in the duality theory of production. This issue could in turn affect the reliable estimates of elasticities which are fundamental requirement to accurate economic forecasting and valid analyses of the impacts of changes in government policies or international events. The crux of the debate is particularly related to whether to estimate cost or profit function and which types of functional form should be used, as well as imposing restrictions on profit and cost functions when those properties are not satisfied by the estimation models. After reviewing the literature, we found that the duality theory may not always hold in empirical work. This depends on many factors such as risk, stochastic error or data quality, and selected functional forms. We also found that the normalized quadratic function has more advantage than other functional forms, although all of flexible functional forms often fail to pass the regularity condition in the duality theory. As such, there is a requirement to impose curvature restriction if normalized quadratic function is used and monotonicity condition needs to be checked if the cross price elasticities are more than unity. We examined the above-mentioned issues by estimating production response for broadacre farms in Western Australia. A normalized quadratic profit function is estimated using the ABARE’s quasi-micro farm level data for the period 1977/78 to 2005/06. The result reflects the imposition of curvature restrictions for a normalized profit function, and estimated elasticities are found to be less elastic in

Keywords: Livestock; Production/Industries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/60240/files/xayavong_AARES_2010.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Estimating Production Response of Broadacre Farms in Western Australia: The Nexus of Empirics and Economics Revisited (2011)
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:ags:aare10:60240

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.60240

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2010 Conference (54th), February 10-12, 2010, Adelaide, Australia from Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().