A comparative efficiency analysis of wheat farms using parametric and nonparametric methods

This study examined whether the efficiency measures were invariant to choice of parametric and nonparametric methods for a sample of 183 wheat farms. The efficiency measures from the deterministic parametric method were smaller than those from the deterministic method. There was a trade-off between scale efficiency and economic efficiency. In the deterministic nonparametric method, the economic efficiency, scale efficiency and overall efficiency results were invariant to the number of inputs or the dimensionality. Only allocative and pure technical efficiency measures depended on the dimensionality. This work illustrated the importance of holding curvature for the cost function in stochastic frontier results.