Economic Efficiency, Structure and Scale Economies in the U.S. Dairy Sector

This study uses a new dataset based on the 2000 Agricultural Resource Management Survey, the most recent national survey of dairy producers in the United States. A shadow cost function is employed to decompose and analyze economic efficiency and scale economies. The study details the development of the data employed in the analysis and focuses on the estimation of scale relationships across farms in different regions and of different sizes. Preliminary results point to important scale economies and suggest that surviving small farms are on average more economically efficient but can exploit scale economies to a much lesser degree than larger farms. The preferred specification of the cost function does not show a region of decreasing returns to scale.Industrial Organization,

Families of Linear Efficiency Programs based on Debreu's Loss Function

Gerard Debreu introduced a well known radial efficiency measure which he called a “coefficient of resource utilization.†He derived this scalar from a much less well known “dead loss†function that characterizes the monetary value sacrificed to inefficiency, and which is to be minimized subject to a normalization condition. We use Debreu’s loss function, together with a variety of normalization conditions, to generate several popular families of linear efficiency programs. Our methodology also can be employed to generate entirely new families of linear efficiency programs.

EVALUATING THE PERFORMANCE OF AGRICULTURAL BANK MANAGEMENT: THE IMPACT OF STATE REGULATORY POLICIES

We evaluate agricultural bank management performance, focusing on the impacts of interstate banking laws on productivity change. The generalized Malmquist productivity index decomposes productivity change into technological change, technical efficiency change, and change in scale economies. While managerial productivity rose from 1982 to 1991, states that adopted the most liberal interstate banking laws experienced the most improvement in productivity. Large agricultural banks were more efficient.generalized Malmquist index, interstate banking, Agricultural Finance, Financial Economics,

EVALUATING THE PERFORMANCE OF AGRICULTURAL BANK MANAGEMENT: THE IMPACT OF STATE REGULATORY POLICIES

We evaluate agricultural bank management performance, focusing on the impacts of interstate banking laws on productivity change. The generalized Malmquist productivity index decomposes productivity change into technological change, technical efficiency change, and change in scale economies. While managerial productivity rose from 1982 to 1991, states that adopt the most liberal interstate banking laws experienced the greatest improvement in productivity. Large agricultural banks were more efficient in states that had more liberalized interstate banking laws while small agricultural banks fared better in states with more restrictive laws.generalized Malmquist index, interstate banking, productivity change, Agricultural Finance,

Incorporating Environmental Impacts in the Measurement of Agricultural Productivity Growth

Agricultural production is known to have environmental impacts, both adverse and beneficial, and it is desirable to incorporate at least some of these impacts in an environmentally sensitive productivity index. In this paper, we construct indicators of water contamination from the use of agricultural chemicals. These environmental indicators are merged with data on marketed outputs and purchased inputs to form a state-by-year panel of relative levels of outputs and inputs, including environmental impacts. We do not have prices for these undesirable by products, since they are not marketed. Consequently, we calculate a series of Malmquist productivity indexes, which do not require price information. Our benchmark scenario is a conventional Malmquist productivity index based on marketed outputs and purchased inputs only. Our comparison scenarios consist of environmentally sensitive Malmquist productivity indexes that include indicators of risk to human health and to aquatic life from chronic exposure to pesticides. In addition, we derive a set of virtual prices of the undesirable by-products that can be used to calculate an environmentally sensitive Fisher index of productivity change.environmental impacts, productivity growth, Environmental Economics and Policy,

Revisión de los objetivos fijados para la red de sucursales de la Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo

In this paper we examine the performance of the target setting procedure employed by one of the largest savings banks in Spain, Caja de Ahorros del Mediterraneo, to evaluate the operating performance of its branch offices. We begin by evaluating the ability of the branch offices to meet the targets established by bank management. We then evaluate the targets themselves, and we find that the list of targets can be substantially reduced without significant loss or distortion of information to bank management. We then re-evaluate the performance of branch offices on the basis of a reduced set of influential targets. The analysis is based on target and achievement data for nearly all of the bank's 600 branch offices for the first semester 1995. En este documento se examinan los resultados de la selección de objetivos usada por la Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo, para evaluar los resultados operativos de sus sucursales. Se empieza por evaluar la capacidad de las sucursales para cumplir los objetivos establecidos por la dirección del banco. A continuación se examinan los objetivos en sí llegando a la conclusión que la lista de objetivos se puede reducir sustancialmente sin que por ello se produzca una pérdida significativa o una distorsión de la información a la dirección. Se evalúan de nuevo los resultados de las sucursales en base a una selección reducida de los objetivos más influyentes. Este análisis se basa en los datos sobre los objetivos y logros de casi todas las 600 sucursales de la Caja durante el primer semestre de 1995.Oficinas bancarias, objetivos, resultados, DEA Branch offices, target setting, operating performance, DEA

MACROECONOMTC PERFORMANCE OF SIXTEEN IBERO-AMERICAN COUNTRIES OVER THE PERIOD 1980-1991

The objective of this study is to analyze the macroeconomic performance of 16 Ibero- American countries over the period 1980- 199 1. Macroeconomic performance is defined as the ability of a country's macroeconomic managers to provide four welfare-enhancing economic services to their citizens: a high leve1 of GDP per capita, a low rate of inflation, a low rate of unemployment, and a favorable trade balance. We use linear programming techniques to construct a best practice macroeconomic performance frontier, against which to measure the relative performance of each country in each year relative to al1 countries in al1 years. We then normalize the data in order to evaluate the quality of the macroeconomic management of each country. El objetivo de este estudio es analizar el rendimiento macroeconómico en 16 países Iberoamericanos durante el período 1980-1991. Se define dicho rendimiento como la capacidad de sus gobernantes de proporcionar cuatro servicios económicos que aumenten el bienestar de sus habitantes: un alto nivel de GDP per cápita, una bajo coeficiente de inflación, un bajo coeficiente en la tasa de desempleo y una balanza comercial favorable. Se usan técnicas de programación lineal para construir la "mejor" frontera experimental de rendimiento macroeconómico, y ésta se usa para evaluar el rendimiento relativo de cada país en cada uno de los años estudiados respecto al conjunto formado por todos los paises durante todos los años. A continuación se normalizan los datos con el fin de evaluar la calidad de la administración macroeconómica de cada país.DEA, Eficiencia, Rendimiento Macroeconómico. DEA, Efficiency , Macroeconomic Performance.

The Cet-Ces-Generalized Leontief Variable Profit Function: An Application to Indian Agriculture

Profit ; production ; observation

Frontier analysis in healthcare

Frontier techniques can be of immense use in establishing the best practice benchmarks against which the performance of healthcare providers can be evaluated. If credible benchmarks are set by frontier techniques, then reimbursement schemes can be guided by the performance of individual providers. Although frontier techniques have gained acceptance in other regulatory arenas, their potential remains unfulfilled in healthcare. This paper speculates on the strengths and weaknesses of the application of frontier techniques in healthcare reimbursement schemes, although the main objective is to introduce the readers to the basics of the techniques. Two techniques are considered; one is regression-based and the other is based on linear programming techniques. Each technique has its own relative advantage depending on the confidence generated by the underlying data or the ability to model a complex service delivery technology