The costs and benefits of policies designed to regulate the use of production contracts will depend in part on the impact of these contracts on farm productivity. In this paper we measure the impact of contracting on 1) partial and total factor productivity and 2) the production technology for...

The study quantitatively determine the impact of policy changes on technical efficiency of small scale food crop farmers in Ondo State, Nigeria, using the stochastic frontier methodology. Given the specifications of the Cobb-Douglas Stochastic frontier models, the results show that the...

Hog production in 2004 was characterized by wide variation in the types, sizes, and economic performance of operations. Operations specializing in a single production phase generated more than three times the product value, on average, of those using the traditional farrow-to-finish approach....

The increasing size and specialization of hog operations reflect structural change in U.S. swine production during the past 15 years. The number of farms with hogs has declined by over 70 percent, as hog enterprises have grown larger. Large operations that specialize in a single phase of...

The major objective of this study was to analyze and link the level of technical efficiency of Nigerian small-scale farmers to specific farmers' socio-economic and policy variables. Data were collected on 461 food crop farmers selected from five states of Southwestern Nigeria. The selection of...