Measurement of technical efficiency in farrow-to-finish swine production using multi-activity network data envelopment analysis: evidence from Taiwan

This study aims to propose a dynamic multi-activity network data development analysis (DMNDEA) model to measure the technical efficiency of farrow-to-finish swine production in Taiwan. Production phases are explicitly divided into two activities; namely, the breed-to-farrow phase and the wean-to-finish phase. By using this model, the problem of shared inputs and dynamic intermediates among activities that characterize pig production are taken into account in an integrated framework, simultaneously with the consideration of non-zero slack, allowing us to examine aspects of production in a more comprehensive and factual manner. For the empirical results based on sample data from 2006 to 2007, it is shown that the overall technical inefficiencies obtained from DMNDEA are not obviously different from those obtained using a traditional one-stage model. However, the DMNDEA results explicitly show us that the sources of inefficiency for each farm are different. Furthermore, second-stage bootstrapping regression results reveal that the determinants of efficiency for each production phase are not the same, indicating the need to identify the influential factors for each production phase separately. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012