In India, fruits and vegetables (F&V) significantly contribute to food and nutritional security; they also enhance the livelihoods of smallholders. In recent years, demand has been increasing for these important crops, yet their productivity has been decelerating. Technical innovations can...

The emphasis of education as a driving force for the growth of agricultural productivity can be dated back to the early 1960s. However, most empirical work failed to take into account of the fact that production technology changes with time and consequently obscure the true contribution of...

This paper examines potential of contract farming as a rural development tool by revealing its effect on productivity and income of small holders in tea production in north-western Vietnam. In the present research, three economic analyses are applied. First, the technical efficiency of tea...

This paper deals with the estimation of a random coefficient model. The virtue of this approach is that it considers firm heterogeneity, which conventional SFA models do not. When the model is applied to Polish farms, the results indicate that the conventional random and fixed effect models...

This paper studies the integration of rice markets in the mid-west and far-west districts of Nepal. The data were drawn mainly from the World Food Programme (WFP) database on Nepal. Results indicate that the rice markets of the hinterland are poorly integrated with the regional market of...

With declining Irish potato production trends in Kenya this paper identifies and analyses factors that influence the economic efficiency of smallholder Irish potato producers in Kenya by drawing on data from random sample of 130 smallholder farmers from Nyandarua North district. A dual...

This paper presents an ex ante analysis of the private and social profitability of the introduction of Bt cotton for a major cotton producing area of northern Mozambique. Cotton is especially relevant to rural poverty reduction because smallholders often have few alternative cash earning...

As one of Thailand’s economic crops, rice plays an important role in generating national income and creating domestic employment for the country. Its production has been increasing because of the expansion of areas planted to rice and not due to increases in productivity. The national average...

This study aimed to understand the issues associated with rainfed rice production in dry and semidry areas in Tamil Nadu, India. Farmers face risks such as input, output, market-price, and income, as these areas are prone to rainfall shortage. Secondary data about Tamil Nadu and various water...

Technical Efficiency (TE) is an estimation of the ability of a household to produce the maximum output with the given inputs. It is usually estimated by using the data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA). Data collected from 261 rice-farming households in the Mekong...