MEASURING TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY FROM PRODUCTION FUNCTIONS: SOME FURTHER ESTIMATES

The concept of economic and technical efficiency is fundamental to agricultural policy-making, and Russell and Young (1983) in this Journal provide a recent addition to the literature for British agriculture. They estimate technical efficiency for a cross-section of farms in the North-West of England for the year 1977/8. However, such measures for a single year may be influenced by particular events in that year. This paper considers some further estimates of farm efficiency but for the longer, four-year period 1974/5 to 1977/8. Three measures of technical efficiency are estimated, two using econometric techniques and one using linear programming methods. It is found that there are low correlations between these different measures of technical efficiency both over time and at one point in time. This casts doubt on the usefulness of measuring efficiency using cross-section (single period) survey data.