Technical and scale efficiency of corporate farms in Slovakia

Abstract

The paper presents results of the analysis of technical and scale efficiency of 1 147 Slovak corporate farms (agricultural co-operatives and commercial farming companies) in 2000. The objective of the analysis was to examine efficiency differences among four size groups of farms. In the analysis, partial performance measures as well as complex efficiency measures - technical efficiency and scale efficiency - have been used. A nonparametric DEA approach has been applied to estimate technical efficiency measures. Significance of the impact of the farm size on efficiency measures has been tested by ANOVA. Analysis results show that from the aspect of technical efficiency the best performance is achieved by farms of the size group bellow 100 ha, and above 1 000 ha. Scale efficiency grows with the farms size and the highest scores are of farms of the size 500-1 000 ha and farms above 1 000 ha. All efficiency differences among farm size groups are statistically significant as regards all three efficiency measures.

Keywords

• corporate farms
• technical efficiency
• scale efficiency
• data envelopment analysis