- ASA 2021 Statistics and Information Systems for Policy Evaluation
- Edited by Bruno Bertaccini, Luigi Fabbris, Alessandra Petrucci
Assessment of agricultural productivity change at country level: A stochastic frontier approach
- Alessandro Magrini
- © 2021 Author(s) |
- CC BY 4.0
- DOI: 10.36253/978-88-5518-461-8.37
In this paper, we estimate agricultural productivity change at country level based on the same data employed by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the current reference data source, using a stochastic frontier model instead of the growth accounting method. The use of a stochastic frontier model is motivated by the opportunity to overcome the limitation of USDA estimates which rely on approximated and imputed input cost shares, and of the growth accounting method in general, which ignores technical inefficiency. We found that, in general, USDA estimates are higher in absolute value than ours but in substantial agreement, confirming the different theoretical foundations of the two methods and suggesting the empirical validity of both of them. Furthermore, our results show that the assumption of constant returns to scale made by many authors appears just a simplification and not a real property of the production processes of the various countries. This work has the value to provide, for the first time in the literature, a comparison between agricultural productivity changes estimated with different methodologies, and an additional data source that can be employed in a large variety of longitudinal economic analyses at country level.
- Keywords:
- agricultural TFP,
- growth accounting,
- Malmquist index,
- technical efficiency,
- translog production frontier,
University of Florence, Italy - ORCID: 0000-0002-7278-5332
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Chapter Information
Chapter Title
Assessment of agricultural productivity change at country level: A stochastic frontier approach
Authors
Alessandro Magrini
Language
English
DOI
10.36253/978-88-5518-461-8.37
Peer Reviewed
Publication Year
2021
Copyright Information
© 2021 Author(s)
Content License
Metadata License
Bibliographic Information
Book Title
ASA 2021 Statistics and Information Systems for Policy Evaluation
Book Subtitle
BOOK OF SHORT PAPERS of the on-site conference
Editors
Bruno Bertaccini, Luigi Fabbris, Alessandra Petrucci
Peer Reviewed
Publication Year
2021
Copyright Information
© 2021 Author(s)
Content License
Metadata License
Publisher Name
Firenze University Press
DOI
10.36253/978-88-5518-461-8
eISBN (pdf)
978-88-5518-461-8
eISBN (xml)
978-88-5518-462-5
Series Title
Proceedings e report
Series ISSN
2704-601X
Series E-ISSN
2704-5846