Download or read book Technical Efficiency of Smallholder Farmers in Ethiopia written by Wengelawit Tessema and published by LAP Lambert Academic Publishing. This book was released on 2010-04 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accounting for over 40% of GDP, 80% of exports, and 80% of the labor force, agriculture has remained Ethiopian economy's most important sector. Agricultural productivity is very low, owing to institutional failures, degradation of land and soil, land fragmentation and desertification and other external factors such as dependence on rain-fed agriculture, which are beyond the control of the ordinary farmers. Given the challenges of ever-increasing population and declining per capita food production, increasing productivity is the top priority of the Ethiopian economy. In this book, efficiency of smallholder farmers in Ethiopia is analyzed in different farming systems and agro-ecological regions, factors affecting farm households' technical efficiency is also examined. The book also accounts efficiency differentials between smallholder farmers in different regions. The analysis tries shedding some light on policy formulation regarding smallholder farming and should also be an interesting piece for professionals in Agriculture and Economics.

Download or read book Technical Efficiency of Smallholder Farmers in Tigray Region Ethiopia written by Shumet Asefa and published by LAP Lambert Academic Publishing. This book was released on 2012-07 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agriculture sector in Ethiopia is characterized by its poor performance, while the population, which largely depends on agriculture, is growing at a faster rate. This necessitates looking for means to increase the productivity of smallholder farmers either by introducing new technologies or improving their technical efficiency at existing technology. And hence, this thesis provides new estimates of small holder farmers' technical efficiency and its principal determinants using a rural Tigray micro finance survey data collected in 2009. Both descriptive and econometric methods are used. The hypotheses tests confirm the adequacy of Cobb-Douglas over Translog frontier; the appropriateness of using SFA over OLS; the joint statistical significance of inefficiency effects; the appropriateness of using truncated normal distribution for one sided error; and the increasing returns to scale nature of the stochastic production function.

Download or read book Three Essays on Technical Efficiency of Smallholder Farmers written by Anthony Baffoe-Bonnie and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first chapter of the dissertation, we estimate the impacts of controlling for environmental production conditions on smallholder farmers' technical efficiency in Ethiopia for maize, sorghum and wheat farming. We use a household panel dataset with annual and cropping season environmental production conditions data. Our results show that accounting for environmental production conditions in the stochastic frontier helps to determine the sources of inefficiencies which may otherwise be ignored or overestimated. The mean estimates of the technical efficiency scores differ when we control for environmental production conditions during the cropping season and annually. The second chapter of the dissertation examines the efficiency of smallholder farmers who adopt improved maize using agricultural household data from Ethiopia. We find that smallholder farmers are becoming more efficient in growing improved seeds than local varieties even though there are still some inefficiencies. The mean technical efficiency of improved maize farmers increases by 2.9%. For improved open pollinated varieties, it increases by 9.21%. We attribute the increase in efficiency to the changes in agricultural systems of most Sub-Saharan African countries. Therefore, given that the dissemination and adoption of improved seeds is increasing in Africa, efforts should be made to assist smallholder farmers to be more efficient in growing these seeds. The third chapter provides an insight into the efficiency of peanut farmers in Haiti. We use the stochastic production frontier to show how the agricultural training program impacts the efficiency of smallholder peanut farmers in Haiti. Specifically, we estimate the technical efficiency of farmers enrolled in the training program offered by a for profit organization and those who qualify to enroll but chose not to. Our results indicate that the program had positive effect on the efficiency of peanut farmers during the spring growing season. Farmers who enrolled in the spring season had efficiency scores of 36% more than those who chose not to enroll. Further, we find a large gap in efficiency scores between farmers who enrolled in the fall and spring growing seasons, suggesting that environmental variables should also be included in farm efficiency studies.

Download or read book Cost and Production Functions written by R.W. Shephard and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is the result of an interest in the economic theory of production intermittently pursued during the past three years. Over this period I have received substantial support from the Office of Naval Research, first from a personal service consulting contract directly with the Mathematics Division of the Office of Naval Research and secondly from Project N6 onr-27009 at Princeton Univer sity under the direction of Professor Oskar Morgenstern. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the ·Office of Naval Research for this support and to Professor Morgenstern, in particular, for his interest in the puolication of this research. The responsibility for errors and omissions, how ever, rests entirely upon the author. Professor G. C. Evans has given in terms of a simple total cost function, depending solely upon output rate, a treatment of certain aspects of the economic theory of production which has inherent generality and convenience of formulation. The classical approach of expressing the technology of production by means of a production function is potentially less restrictive than the use of a simple total cost function, but it has not been applied in a more general form other than to derive the familiar conditions between marginal productivities of the factors of produc tion and their market prices.

Download or read book The economics of teff Exploring Ethiopia s biggest cash crop written by Minten, Bart and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2018-07-19 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considerable poverty and food insecurity in Ethiopia, combined with the overwhelming majority of Ethiopians who depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, make agricultural transformation a crucial development goal for the country. One promising improvement is to increase production of teff, the calorie- and nutrient-rich but low-yielding staple. The Economics of Teff: Exploring Ethiopia’s Biggest Cash Crop examines key aspects of teff production, marketing, and consumption, with a focus on opportunities for and challenges to further growth. The authors identify ways to realize teff’s potential, including improving productivity and resilience, selecting and scaling up new technologies, establishing distribution systems adapted to different areas’ needs, managing labor demand and postharvest operations, and increasing access to larger and more diverse markets. The book’s analysis and policy conclusions should be useful to policy makers, researchers, and others concerned with Ethiopia’s economic development.

Download or read book A Comparative Analysis of the Technical Efficiency of Rain fed and Smallholder Irrigation in Ethiopia written by Makombe, G. and published by IWMI. This book was released on 2011-08-02 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agriculture is the most significant contributor to Ethiopia’s economy. Most of the agricultural production is under rainfed conditions and thus extremely sensitive to rainfall variability. Irrigation development, including smallholder irrigation, is used by the Ethiopian Government to attempt to mitigate the effects of rainfall variability. In this study, we look at smallholder irrigation – modern and traditional irrigation systems. A detailed description of the cropping patterns is given. The stochastic frontier production function approach is used to estimate technical inefficiency, and constraints to production are analyzed. Since the traditional system is found to be efficient but on a lower production frontier, the study shows that significant gains can be made by raising the frontier of the traditional systems and increasing the efficiency of the modern systems. Among the production constraints studied were land preparation, soil fertility, weed control, pests and diseases, soil erosion, input access and moisture deficiency. The most significant constraints on the irrigated systems were input access and moisture deficiency.

Download or read book Accelerating technical change through video mediated agricultural extension Evidence from Ethiopia written by Abate, Gashaw T. and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite a rapidly growing enthusiasm around applications of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to smallholder agriculture in developing countries, there are still many questions on the effectiveness of ICT-based approaches. This study assesses the effects of videomediated agricultural extension service provision on farmers’ knowledge and adoption of improved agricultural technologies and practices in Ethiopia. The study focuses on a program piloted by the Government of Ethiopia and Digital Green and poses three questions. First, to what extent does video-mediated extension lead to increased uptake of improved agricultural technologies and practices by smallholder farmers? Second, is video-mediated extension targeted at both spouses of the household more effective than when only targeted at the (typically male) household head? Third, how cost-effective is a video-mediated approach to extension provision? The study explores these questions with a randomized controlled trial designed to evaluate the video-mediated approach as applied to three priority crops (teff, wheat, maize) and three technologies (row planting, precise seeding rates, and urea dressing). The trial was implemented in 347 kebeles (village clusters) during the 2017 meher (rainy) season in Ethiopia’s four most agriculturally important regional states. Analysis of data from our surveys of 2,422 households and 896 extension agents indicates that the video-mediated approach is more effective than the conventional approach in achieving several key outcomes. Specifically, we find that videomediated extension reaches a wider audience than the conventional approach and leads to higher levels of agricultural knowledge and uptake of technologies in those kebeles randomly assigned to the program. While our results do point to greater participation and greater knowledge of female spouses in kebeles where both male and female spouses were targeted by the program, we do not find clear evidence that the more inclusive approach translated into higher uptake of the subject technologies and practices. Finally, we find that the video-mediated approach becomes less costly as the scale of operation increases.

Download or read book Technical Efficiency of Farmers in Ethiopia written by Askal Ayalew Ali and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Impact of Agricultural Cooperatives on Smallholders Technical Efficiency written by Gashaw Tadesse Abate and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using household survey data from Ethiopia, this paper evaluates the impact of agricultural cooperatives on smallholders' technical efficiency. We utilize propensity score matching to compare the average difference in technical efficiency between cooperative farmers and similar independent farmers. The approach assumes exogenous cooperative formation and similar farm technology across households. The results show that agricultural cooperatives are effective in providing support services that significantly contribute to members' technical efficiency. These results are found to be insensitive to hidden bias and consistent with the idea that agricultural cooperatives enhance members' efficiency by easing access to productive inputs and facilitating extension linkages. Based on the findings, increased participation in agricultural cooperatives should further enhance efficiency gains among smallholder farmers.

Download or read book Food and Agriculture in Ethiopia written by Paul Dorosh and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-02-11 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The perception of Ethiopia projected in the media is often one of chronic poverty and hunger, but this bleak assessment does not accurately reflect most of the country today. Ethiopia encompasses a wide variety of agroecologies and peoples. Its agriculture sector, economy, and food security status are equally complex. In fact, since 2001 the per capita income in certain rural areas has risen by more than 50 percent, and crop yields and availability have also increased. Higher investments in roads and mobile phone technology have led to improved infrastructure and thereby greater access to markets, commodities, services, and information. In Food and Agriculture in Ethiopia: Progress and Policy Challenges, Paul Dorosh and Shahidur Rashid, along with other experts, tell the story of Ethiopia's political, economic, and agricultural transformation. The book is designed to provide empirical evidence to shed light on the complexities of agricultural and food policy in today's Ethiopia, highlight major policies and interventions of the past decade, and provide insights into building resilience to natural disasters and food crises. It examines the key issues, constraints, and opportunities that are likely to shape a food-secure future in Ethiopia, focusing on land quality, crop production, adoption of high-quality seed and fertilizer, and household income. Students, researchers, policy analysts, and decisionmakers will find this book a useful overview of Ethiopia's political, economic, and agricultural transformation as well as a resource for major food policy issues in Ethiopia. Contributors: Dawit Alemu, Guush Berhane, Jordan Chamberlin, Sarah Coll-Black, Paul Dorosh, Berhanu Gebremedhin, Sinafikeh Asrat Gemessa, Daniel O. Gilligan, John Graham, Kibrom Tafere Hirfrfot, John Hoddinott, Adam Kennedy, Neha Kumar, Mehrab Malek, Linden McBride, Dawit Kelemework Mekonnen, Asfaw Negassa, Shahidur Rashid, Emily Schmidt, David Spielman, Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse, Seneshaw Tamiru, James Thurlow, William Wiseman.

Download or read book Technical Efficiency of Sesame Production written by Abel Manaye and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2017-07-20 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Master's Thesis from the year 2016 in the subject Business economics - Supply, Production, Logistics, , course: Agricultural Economics, language: English, abstract: This study aimed to analyze the technical efficiency of sesame production in Humera area and to identify major factors that cause efficiency differentials of smallholder farmers. The objective of the study is to measure the technical efficiency of small holder farmers in sesame production. The study was conducted using a cross sectional data collected in 2015/2016-production year from a total sample of 110 households. Cobb-Douglas function was employed to estimate technical efficiency of smallholder farmers in sesame production. The finding of the study indicated that there is inefficiency in the production of sesame in the study area. The estimation of the frontier model with inefficiency variables shows that the mean technical efficiency of farmers is 0.69 (69%). This implies that production of sesame can be increased by 31 percent given the existing technological level. This indicates that the farmers did not using production inputs efficiently in such a way that they give their maximum potential. The estimated stochastic production frontier model together with the inefficiency parameters suggests that any attempt to strengthen technical efficiency of smallholder farmers in the study area must give due attention to the improvement of the principal causes for efficiency differentials such as education, age, extension contact, credit availability, off farm activities and proximity, which were found to be significant determinants of efficiency level. The negative coefficient of educational status, age, credit availability, extension contact and off farm activities means these factors are important in determining the existing efficiency of farmers positively and significantly. While the positive coefficients of proximity indicate that the increments in these factors increase inefficiency. Given the limited resources in the study area will enable the concerned parties engaged in efforts for improvement of the product and productivity of this part of the community to bring about the desired changes in a cost effective way than trying to inject an investment on the production of sesame.

Download or read book The Role of Agriculture in Poverty Reduction written by Luc J. Christiaensen and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2006 with total page 49 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relative contribution of a sector to poverty reduction is shown to depend on its direct and indirect growth effects as well as its participation effect. The paper assesses how these effects compare between agriculture and non-agriculture by reviewing the literature and by analyzing cross-country national accounts and poverty data from household surveys. Special attention is given to Sub-Saharan Africa. While the direct growth effect of agriculture on poverty reduction is likely to be smaller than that of non-agriculture (though not because of inherently inferior productivity growth), the indirect growth effect of agriculture (through its linkages with nonagriculture) appears substantial and at least as large as the reverse feedback effect. The poor participate much more in growth in the agricultural sector, especially in low-income countries, resulting in much larger poverty reduction impact. Together, these findings support the overall premise that enhancing agricultural productivity is the critical entry-point in designing effective poverty reduction strategies, including in Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, to maximize the poverty reducing effects, the right agricultural technology and investments must be pursued, underscoring the need for much more country specific analysis of the structure and institutional organization of the rural economy in designing poverty reduction strategies.

Download or read book Identification of Factors Which Influence the Technical Inefficiency of Indian Farmers written by Tim Coelli and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The agricultural production of Indian farmers is investigated using a stochastic frontier production function which incorporates a model for the technical inefficiency effects. Farm-level data from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) are used. Variables considered in the model for the inefficiency effects include the age and level of education of the farmers, farm size and the year of observation. The parameters of the stochastic frontier production function are estimated simultaneously with those involved in the model for the inefficiency effects. This approach differs from the usual practice of predicting farm-level inefficiency effects and then regressing these upon various factors in a second-stage of modelling. The results indicate that the above factors do have a significant influence upon the inefficiency effects of farmers in two of the three villages considered.

Download or read book Economics Efficiency of Maize Production in Gudeya Bila District Ethiopia written by Tolesa Tesema and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2022-01-12 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2021 in the subject Agrarian Studies, , language: English, abstract: Farming is the way of life for smallholder farmers of Ethiopian which is characterized with low productivity. Thus poor are failing to achieve rapid economic growth due to food insecurity. Hence the best possible means of achieving economic development is through increasing sustainable allocation resource efficiency. This study employed stochastic frointer approach to assess the levels of efficiency and Tobit model to assess the determinants of efficiency by collecting data from 154 sample household in Gudeya Bila district, western parts of Ethiopia.

Download or read book Improved Production Technology and Efficiency of Smallholder Farmers in Ethiopia written by Arega Demelash Alene and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Impact of Technological Change on Household Production and Food Security in Smallholders Agriculture written by Setotaw Ferede Tesema and published by Cuvillier Verlag. This book was released on 2006 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Analysis of Technical Efficiency of Agricultural Production in Ethiopia written by Midlaster Daniel Nsanzugwanko and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: