Modelling Farm Production Decisions Under an Expenditure Constraint

We use the indirect production function approach in the stochastic frontier framework to estimate separately the output losses due to the presence of a budget constraint and technical inefficiency. We develop a methodology for estimating the severity and testing the significance of the expenditure constraint at individual producer level. Our results, based on the farm data from three Russian regions from 1999 to 2003, show that the majority of the farms studied were expenditure-constrained during the study period. Expenditure constraints caused, on average, a potential output loss of 20 per cent. Output loss due to technical inefficiency, on average, is found to be around 13 per cent