This article presents multi-output, multi-input total factor productivity (TFP) growth rates in agriculture for 88 countries over the 1970–2001 period, estimated with both stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and the more commonly employed data envelopment analysis (DEA). We find results with...

This study compares the empirical performances of the parametric distance functions(PDF) and data envelopment analysis (DEA) with applications to adopters of improved cereal production technology in eastern Ethiopia. The results from both approaches revealed substantial technical inefficiencies...

The concept of efficiency in groups postulates that a coalition of firms has to record a smaller distance toward the aggregate technology frontier compared with the sum of individual distances. Efficiency analysis (either allocative or technical) is defined with respect to cooperative firm game...

In industry sectors where market prices for goods and services are unavailable, it is common to use estimated output and input distance functions to estimate rates of productivity change. It is also possible, but less common, to use estimated distance functions to estimate the normalised support...

The bank efficiency literature lacks an agreed definition of bank outputs and inputs. This is problematic given the long-standing controversy concerning the status of deposits, but also because bank efficiency estimates are known to be affected by the inclusion of additional outputs such as...

This paper analyses the evolution of total factor productivity and its decomposition between 1986 and 2005 in the Spanish port authorities using a parametric distance function approach. During this period, the Spanish port authorities experienced three important regulatory changes. The results...

Diewert and Fox (2013) proposed decompositions of a Malmquist-type productivity index into explanatory factors, with a focus on extracting technical progress, technical efficiency change and returns to scale components. A major problem with their decompositions is that it may be difficult to...

Inequalities created by relating gauge (distance) functions and their dual support functions have been used in economics and operations research/management science to measure efficiency and productivity. The most familiar example is the Farrell (1957) measure of cost efficiency and its...

This paper measures resource use efficiency of electricity generating plants in the United States under the SO2 trading regime. Resource use efficiency is defined as the product of technical efficiency and environmental efficiency, where the latter is the ratio of good output (electricity) to...

Assignments of weak orders to complete binary relations are considered. Firstly, it is shown that assigning the transitive closure of a complete binary relation does not always assign the closest weak order according to any reasonable metric on complete binary relations. It is then shown that...