Measuring total factor productivity on Irish dairy farms: a Fisher index approach using farm-level data

peer reviewedThis paper presents a Fisher index measure of the total factor productivity (TFP) performance of Irish dairy farms over the period 2006–2016 using the Teagasc National Farm Survey (NFS) data. The removal of milk quotas in 2015 has led to an increase of over 30% in dairy cow numbers since 2010, and although suckler cow numbers have dropped slightly, the total number of cows in Ireland reached an all-time high of 2.5 million head in 2016. This large increase adds to the environmental pressures attributed to agricultural output and puts the focus firmly on how efficiently the additional agricultural output associated with higher cow numbers is produced. The primary purpose of this paper is to identify a standardised measure of the TFP performance of Irish dairy farms that can be routinely updated using Teagasc NFS data. We found that relative to 2010 the TFP of Irish dairy farms has increased by almost 18%; however, in one production year 2015, when milk quota was removed, the TFP measure increased by 7% and TFP continued to grow by 2.5% in the production year 2016. It would seem therefore that the removal of the European dairy quota system has resulted in a windfall gain for Irish dairy farmers but that productivity gains are continuing. Future data will be required to investigate the longer-term TFP performance of Irish dairy farms in the post-milk quota era

Profit, Productivity, Price and Quality Performance Changes in the English and Welsh Water and Sewerage Companies

The purpose of this paper is the evaluation of various profit drivers such as price changes, productivity changes and quality levels on the financial performance of the Water and Sewerage Companies (WaSCs) over time in the case when the number of observations is limited. We thereby follow Maziotis, Saal and Thanassoulis (2012) approach and extend it by measuring the impact of exogenous factors such as drinking water and sewerage treatment quality on profitability, productivity and price performance measures. The results suggest that while quality improvements have significantly contributed to the productivity performance of the WaSCs, they have also contributed negatively to their price performance. Overall, after 2000 steady reductions in average price performance, gains in productivity and stable economic profitability were apparent. This trend indicates Ofwat's policy on passing productivity benefits to consumers, and sustaining stable profitability than it was in earlier regulatory periods. This technique is of great interest for both regulators and regulated companies to better identify the sources of profit variation and aid them in evaluating both the effectiveness of a regulatory price cap scheme and the performance of the regulated companies, when the sample size is extremely limited

An Economic Justification for the EKS Multilateral Index

A justification for the use of the EKS multilateral index can be given from the economic approach to index numbers. Copyright 2003 by the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth.

Purchasing Power Parities for Industry Comparisons Using Weighted Elteto-Koves-Szulc (EKS) Methods

This study has three main objectives. First, it develops a generalization of the commonly used EKS method to multilateral price comparisons. It is shown that the EKS system can be generalized so that weights can be attached to each of the link comparisons used in the EKS computations. These weights can account for differing levels of reliability of the underlying binary comparisons. Second, various reliability measures and corresponding weighting schemes are presented and their merits discussed. Finally, these new methods are applied to an international data set of manufacturing prices from the ICOP project. Although theoretically superior, it appears that the empirical impact of the weighted EKS method is generally small compared to the unweighted EKS. It is also found that this impact is larger when it is applied at lower levels of aggregation. Finally, the importance of using sector specific PPPs in assessing relative levels of manufacturing productivity is indicated. Copyright 2003 Blackwell Publishing Ltd..