A Soil-Quality Index and Its Relationship to Efficiency and Productivity Growth Measures: Two Decompositions

This article reconciles two notions of soil-quality indexes with the economic concepts of technical efficiency and productivity growth. An example uses data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's experimental fields in Maryland and data envelopment analysis techniques to estimate a soil-quality index consistent with the notion of technical efficiency. Common regression techniques shed additional light on the role of individual soil-quality properties in a very restricted linear approximation of the estimated soil-quality index. Copyright 1999, Oxford University Press.