Production risk and technical inefficiency in Russian agriculture

This study investigates production risk and technical inefficiency as two possible sources of the production variability that characterised Russian agriculture during the last decade. The empirical analysis is conducted using panel data from 1996 to 2001 on 443 large agricultural enterprises from three regions in central, southern and Volga Russia. A production function specification accounting for the effect of inputs on both risk and technical inefficiency is found to describe production technologies of Russian farms more appropriately than the traditional stochastic frontier formulation. Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.