Agricultural efficiency of rice farmers in Myanmar : a case study in selected areas

This paper try to analyze unique data set for rice producing agricultural households in some selected areas of Bago and Yangon divisions to examine the households' profit efficiency and the relationship between farm and household attributes and profit inefficiency using a Cobb-Douglas production frontier function. The frequency distribution reveals that the mean technical inefficiency is 0.1627 with a minimum of 3 percent and maximum of 73 percent which indicates that, on average, about 16% of potential maximum output is lost owing to technical inefficiency in both studied areas. While 85% of the sample farms exhibit profit inefficiency of 20% or less, about 40% of the sample farms is found to exhibit technical inefficiency of 20% or less, indicating that among the sample farms technical inefficiency is much lower than profit inefficiency.

Agglomeration Economies in Japan: Technical Efficiency, Growth and Unemployment

This paper examines if the effects of agglomeration economies get manifested in technical efficiency and generate faster economic growth and higher (lower) levels of employment (unemployment). Using the prefecture level data for each of the two-digit groups of industries in Japan, the paper estimates region-specific technical efficiency index based on the stochastic frontier production function framework. The results of the factor analysis show that in most of the industry-groups (with a few exceptions) efficiency has a positive association with external scale variable(s). Though the relationship is not seen to be very strong, it would be equally erroneous to ignore the effect of agglomeration economies on efficiency. In the case of some of the light goods industries the agglomeration effect is relatively stronger. Further, economic growth varies positively with external scale variable(s) and unemployment rate tends to fall with respect to growth and concentration. All this tends to suggest that measures against industrial concentration may be counter-productive, particularly in the context of globalisation when countries are in dire need of raising productivity.

Has Low Productivity Constrained Competitiveness of African Firms? : Comparison of the Firm Performances with Asian Firms

It has been argued that poor productive performance is one of critical sources of stagnation of the African manufacturing sector, but firm-level empirical supports are limited. Using the inter-regional firm data of the garment industry, technical efficiency and its contribution to competitiveness measured as unit costs were compared between Kenyan and Bangladeshi firms. Our estimates indicated that there is no significant gap in the average technical efficiency of the two industries despite conservative estimation, although unit costs greatly differ between the two industries. Higher unit cost in Kenyan firms mainly stems from high labour cost, while impact of inefficiency is quite small. Productivity accounts little for the stagnation of garment industry in several African countries.