To address challenges for the 21st century, the Chinese government initiated a series of higher education reforms to support the open-door policy of China. Part of the education reform involves an allocation of additional funding of US$ 20 billion to a group of 112 universities to strengthen...

Increasing energy efficiency and exploiting energy saving potential are two important practices that can help to ensure future energy security in China. This paper proposes a new total factor energy efficiency indicator, based on the directional meta-frontier data envelopment analysis (DEA)...

The telecommunications industry has a great ripple effect on the overall national economy. However, there is no consensus about what is the optimal regulation policy for the telecommunications industry. Regulations on the telecommunications industry are different by region (i.e. United States,...

We estimate the efficiency of groundwater use in cotton production in the Punjab province of Pakistan. We use a survey data of 189 cotton producers comprising 98 tube-well owners and 91 water buyers in order to get the differential impact of tube-well ownership on groundwater use efficiency. We...

This paper compares the organic and conventional citriculture systems in Spain from the perspective of their technical efficiency. The efficiency of the two growing systems is compared in relation to a metafrontier that envelops both technologies in order to identify the limitations each farming...

We estimate the efficiency of groundwater use in cotton production in the Punjab province of Pakistan. We use a survey data of 189 cotton producers comprising 98 tube-well owners and 91 water buyers in order to get the differential impact of tube-well ownership on groundwater use efficiency. We...

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...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the regional productivity differentials on dairy farms in Denmark, Finland and Sweden. Several methods have been suggested for analysing productivity differentials in agriculture between groups of farms or countries. Hayami [5] and Hayami and Ruttan [7]...

This study uses the concept of meta-frontier function to examine the technical efficiency and varietal-gap of rice production in Nigeria. A random sample of 675 farmers was selected from three out six geographical zones in Nigeria. The farmers in this study were classified into three groups...

This paper measures the energy efficiency performance with carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 30 provinces in China during the period of 1997–2011 using a meta-frontier framework with the improved directional distance function (DDF). We construct a new environmental production possibility set...