Nutrients balance such as nitrogen and phosphorus balance are increasingly used as an indicator of the environmental performance of agricultural sector in international and global context. However there still is a lack of harmony in the use of methods for estimating the nutrients balance among...

Nitrogen balance is increasingly used as an indicator of the environmental performance of agricultural sector in national, international, and global contexts. There are three main methods of accounting the national nitrogen balance: farm gate, soil surface, and soil system. OECD (2008) recently...

This paper develops a new measure of total factor productivity growth in agricultural production which incorporates environmental effects. The new measure is called the Total Factor Nutrient-Orientated Productivity (TFNP) Index, and incorporates a materials balance condition. TFNP measures...

Recent literature has argued that environmental efficiency (EE), which is built on the materials balance (MB) principle, is more suitable than other EE measures in situations where the law of mass conversation regulates production processes. In addition, the MB-based EE method is particularly...

This article proposes to use nutrient-orientated environmental efficiency (EE) measures to construct a nutrient total factor productivity index (NTFP). Since nutrient-orientated EE measures are consistent with the materials balance principle, NTFP index is superior to other existing TFP indexes....

This article presents a two-stage analytical framework that integrates ecological crop (animal) growth and economic frontier production models to analyse the productive efficiency of crop (animal) production systems. The ecological crop (animal) growth model estimates "potential" output levels...

Environmental efficiency measures constructed using the materials balance principle have two important shortcomings: (1) the ambiguity in the treatment of immaterial inputs and the various types of energy and (2) the lack of universally accepted weights for various material inputs. These two...