Efficiency in South African Agriculture: A Two-Stage Fuzzy Approach

Goodness Aye (), Rangan Gupta and Peter Wanke ()
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Goodness Aye: Department of Economics, University of Pretoria, Pretoria
Peter Wanke: COPPEAD Graduate Business School, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

No 201658, Working Papers from University of Pretoria, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper presents an efficiency assessment of agricultural production in South Africa from 1970-2014, using an integrated two-stage fuzzy approach. More precisely, Fuzzy TOPSIS is used to assess the relative efficiency of agriculture in South Africa over the course of the years. In the second stage, fuzzy regressions based on different rule-based systems are used to predict the impact of socio-economic and demographic variables on agricultural efficiency. They are confronted with the bootstrapped truncated regressions with conditional α-levels proposed in Wanke et al. (2016a). The results reveal that R&D, land quality, health expenditure-population growth ratio have a significant, positive impact on efficiency levels, besides the GINI index. Specifically in terms of accuracy, fuzzy regressions outperformed the bootstrapped truncated regressions with conditional α-levels. Policy implications are derived.

Keywords: Agriculture; South Africa; Fuzzy TOPSIS; Fuzzy Regression; Performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C6 D24 Q10 Q28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2016-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cse and nep-eff
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pre:wpaper:201658

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