A steep decline in coffee prices at the producer level led to considerable pressure for farmers in Costa Rica and producer countries all over the world. One possible reaction was moving to specialty markets, where price pressure was perceived to be lower. We use original survey data from...

Supermarkets are gaining ground in the agri-food systems of many developing countries. While recent research has analyzed income effects in the small farm sector, impacts on productivity and efficiency have hardly been studied. We use a meta-frontier approach and combine this with propensity...

Incorporating the ecological variable of grassland Net Primary Productivity (NPP) into the production function - to be representative of grassland quality - is a new step toward the ecological efficiency analysis under the field of productivity and efficiency analysis. We measure the technical...

The paper investigates the impact of subsidies and of para-agriculture on the technical efficiency of organic farms in Switzerland, Austria and Southern Germany. The data-set consists of bookkeeping data with 1,704 observations in the years 2003 to 2005. Technical efficiency is modelled using a...

An important approach to reducing persistent technical inefficiency is through technical change. This paper considers the case of genetically modified crop production. A stochastic frontier approach is used to examine how a drastic change from non-GM to GM technology effects the position of the...