Den Schwerpunkt dieses Discussion Papers bildet eine Effizienzanalyse landwirtschaftlicher Unternehmen Sachsen-Anhalts und Tschechiens. Mittels der Data Envelopment Analysis, einer nicht-parametrischen, auf linearer Programmierung basierenden Methode der Effizienzmessung, wurden die technischen,...

This paper proposes a new interpretation of the farm size-productivity relationship. Using two rounds of the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey, and drawing on earlier work on five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, the paper shows that the relationship between farm size and productivity is neither...

During the transition towards a market economy in Romania most enterprises established at the time of industrialization and urbanization project of the communist period reduced or stopped their activity and many employees lost their jobs. A reverse migration from urban to rural areas took place,...

This paper is concerned with agri-environmental policy in Germany and focuses in particular on soil and water conservation. At first it discusses to what extent agriculture contributes to erosion and the pollution of surface waters and groundwater with nutrients and pesticides. Whereas erosion...

The economic literature on pest control exclusively assumes a non-negative marginal product of pesticides based on a monotonic non-decreasing function of damage abatement, which may bias pesticide productivity estimates. This paper proposes a specification that allows for a negative marginal...

We compute aggregate productivity of three categories of regions, classified by level of urbanization in the Netherlands, from firm-specific total factor productivity (TFP) measures. TFP measures are estimated by a semi-parametric algorithm, within 2-digit industries, covering agriculture,...

Although good and timely information on agricultural production is critical for policy-decisions, the quality of underlying data is often low and improving data quality could have a high payoff. This paper uses data from a production diary, administered concurrently with a standard household...