Given n independent and identically distributed observations in a set G with an unknown function g, called a boundary or frontier, it is desired to estimate g from the observations. The problem has several important applications including classification and cluster analysis, and is closely...

Bt cotton has been cultivated in China for the past 10 years. Limitations of previous studies analyzing the impact of this technology are the short time period considered and lack of panel data. In this paper, we present findings from monitoring 150 Bt cotton farmers in 2002 and 2005....

Small and medium enterprises are an important factor in the East African economies especially with respect to employment. The increasing competition through globalisation puts them under considerable pressure. Through the rapid spread of information and communication technologies (ICT) and ever...

This paper raises several issues concerning productivity analysis. An attempt is made to demonstrate the usefulness of a micro-based approach to productivity analysis which challenges some basic assumptions of conventional analyses based on aggregate production functions. With the help of a...

All business transactions as well as achieving innovations take up resources, subsumed under the concept of transaction costs. One of the major factors in transaction costs theory is information. Firm networks can catalyse the interpersonal information exchange and hence, increase the access to...

The Danish "Klima 2020" plan sets an ambitious target for the complete phasing-out of fossil fuels by 2050. The Danish energy sector currently accounts for 40% of national CO2 emissions. Based on an extended Farrell input distance function that accounts for CO2 as an undesirable output, we...

The object of the present paper is to analyze the productivity of marketing cooperatives incorporating environmental inputs/outputs. In the European agricultural policy, expectations for attaining sustainable and competitive agriculture lie to a great extent on the cooperative sector’s ability...

Traditional productivity measures have been much less prevalent than other measures of economic and biological performance in fisheries economics. It has been increasingly recognized, however, that mod eling and measuring fisheries’ production relationships is central to understanding and...

This paper reassesses the debate over the role of education in farm pro duction in Bangladesh using a large dataset on rice producing hous eholds from 141 villages. Average and stochastic production frontier functions are estimated to ascertain the effect of education on productivity and...

A time series model is estimated to identify the interrelation among prices on the international and the EU domestic market for butter. Although the findings were not derived from a causal model, the inspection of the data provides economically reasonable and important insights in structural...