Romanian Maize - Distorted Prices and Producer Efficiency

Johannes Sauer and Borbala Balint

No 25597, 2006 Annual Meeting, August 12-18, 2006, Queensland, Australia from International Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: 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%.

Keywords: Crop; Production/Industries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/25597/files/cp060756.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ags:iaae06:25597

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.25597

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2006 Annual Meeting, August 12-18, 2006, Queensland, Australia from International Association of Agricultural Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().