A comparison of the efficiency of producers under collective and individual modes of organisation

This paper compares collective and individual production systems’ technical and allocative efficiency. The producers being studied belong to Honduran agrarian reform cooperatives engaging in collective and/or individual maize production. Debreu-Farrell technical efficiency related to stochastic production is calculated. Allocative efficiency is obtained from an analytically derived cost frontier. Results indicate that collective systems are slightly more efficient than individual production systems. Worker-shirking (one of the most cited theoretical arguments against collective forms of enterprise) would seem to have no empirical basis from these results