TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY CHANGE OF RICE FARMERS IN THE CROPPING SEASONS OF CHIANG MAI PROVINCE, THAILAND

Abstract

Rice has become an important economic crop due to the biggest main staple food in South-East Asian countries. However, rice farmers usually faced several complications including low production efficiency because of the high transactional cost of accessing inputs. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to measure technical efficiency changes and then decompose these changes into several levels of efficiency. The data was collected from November 2021 until June 2022 from three cropping seasons containing 200 observations from 4 districts in Chiang Mai Province, Thailand. Stochastic production frontiers with the Cobb-Douglas functional model were used to analyze technical efficiency (TE) levels. The results indicated that the average TE for rice farmers of 76.30% and the average TE change of - 0.007% in all cropping seasons. Moreover, the findings also revealed that fertilizer and material costs had negatively and significantly impacted farmers’ efficiency. By contrast, years of education, labor, and water costs had positively and significantly affected farmers’ efficiency. This study suggested that additional investments in research and improved technologies could be further promoted to increase rice productivity and the level of farmers’ efficiency.

Keywords

• cropping season
• rice productivity
• stochastic production frontier
• technical efficiency change