Over-allocation of irrigation water has led to widespread environmental degradation in the Murray-Darling Basin, prompting discussions of the water efficiency performance of irrigated industries, particularly cotton. There is increasing pressure for irrigators to adopt water efficient practices...

Improving farm productivity is often touted as essential for the future prospects of Australian agriculture, particularly for the export-oriented broadacre farm sector. This paper draws on farm panel data for the period 2002 to 2011. The annual components of productivity of the same group of 223...

Restrictive irrigation water policies established due to e.g. environmental concerns or water scarcity appear to result in declining farm income and arising risk exposure in terms of yield uncertainty. With this in mind, we investigate the potential of index-based weather insurance, which is...

This paper develops a theoretical model to examine the relationship between the input elasticity of (technical) substitution and both farm total factor productivity and size. In the presence of ongoing technical change and its factor bias, the ‘income effect’ arising from farms’ cost...

The total factor productivity indexes of five key Commonwealth fisheries have been developed using the Fisher index and ABARES survey data. Where fish stock biomass information is available, these indexes are also adjusted for changes in fish stocks. In trend terms, productivity increased over...

The objective of this paper is to review likely trends in key drivers of productivity with a view to suggesting the rate of productivity growth that is likely to be required to maintain the competitiveness of Australian agriculture both within the Australian economy and relative to the...

Data Envelope Analysis, (DEA), a linear programming technique, provides a more consistent measure of efficiency than the commonly cited partial measures of farm efficiency. It yields a relative measure of efficiency and identifies inputs or outputs that are under utilized. In this paper, DEA is...