Pro-poor growth has been identified as one of the most promising pathways to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) or any subsequent set of goals aiming to reduce poverty worldwide. Related research has developed a multitude of instruments to measure pro-poor growth using absolute and...

The present study uses local maximum likelihood (LML) methods recently proposed by Kumbhakar et al. (2007) to assess the technical efficiency of arable crop Kansas farms. LML techniques overcome the most relevant limitations associated to mainstream parametric stochastic frontier models. Results...

This paper studies the impact of agglomeration and selection on firms' total factor productivity (TFP) distributions depending on their spatial location, specifically in science parks and large cities in Taiwan. The TFP distributions indicate a mean-shift and greater dispersion whenever firms...

A procedure is developed to examine the ex-post impacts of improved maize varieties on poverty in rural Ethiopia. Yield and cost effects of adoption are estimated econometrically under assumptions of both homogeneous and heterogeneous treatment effects. A backward derivation procedure is...

This research carries out a technical efficiency assessment for a small-scale fishery in Mexico. Technical efficiency (TE) is measured as the deviation of the firm (i.e. fisher) production from the best practice production frontier (Kumbhakar and Lovell 2000). Under TE, fishing production is...

This paper analyses the household level drivers of agricultural output in Nyabihu District, a densely populated area of rural Rwanda, over the past 26 years. We use a unique two-wave panel dataset spanning a 26-year period, linking the split-off households in 2012 to the original households in...

This paper studies the effect of local off-farm employment and migration on rural households’ technical efficiency of crop production using a five-year panel dataset from more than 2,000 households in five Chinese provinces. While there is not much debate about the positive contribution of...

Productivity growth is decomposed into two components: technical change and efficiency change. This assesses their relative importance to the international competitiveness of the agricultural sectors of selected Caribbean countries. A nonparametric programming method is employed to compute...

The measurement of productivity fluctuations has been the focus of decades-long interest. In addition to broad structural forces driving productivity changes, there is more recent interest in measuring and identifying the heterogeneous forces driving these changes. A major force is...