Impact of Policy Changes on Technical Efficiency on Farmers: Empirical Evidence From Nigerian Small Scale Food Crop Farmers

The study quantitatively determine the impact of policy changes on technical efficiency of small scale food crop farmers in Ondo State, Nigeria, using the stochastic frontier methodology. Given the specifications of the Cobb-Douglas Stochastic frontier models, the results show that the elasticity of mean value of farm output is an increasing function of land, labour and implements. The mean value of farm output is also estimated to be an increasing function of agrochemicals and seeds. The results indicate that an increasing returns-to-scale exists among the farmers. The analysis shows a wide variation in the estimated technical efficiencies, ranging between 0.22 and 0.89. The results of simulation on policy variables show that the level of technical efficiency would significantly increase with rising level of education, farming experience and amount of credit used and decline with the age of the farmers.