Regional Technical Efficiency Differentials in the Turkish Agriculture: A Note

A panel data, (67 provinces and the years 1993-1995) of the Turkish agriculture, was employed to estimate technical efficiencies for six agricultural regions and 67 provinces using maximum likelihood techniques (ML). Stochastic frontier based on Cobb-Douglas production function with agricultural value added as the endogenous variable and land, labour and capital as the exogenous variables was estimated. Index of capital stocks was obtained by principal component technique. The results show that differences in technical efficiencies by regions and provinces are significant. Furthermore, it has been shown that some of these differences can be explained by location specific factors such as amount of precipitation, market accessibility and population density.