Measuring efficiency of irrigation water use in the Egyptian Agricultural sector: A comparison of stochastic and deterministic frontier methods
1994
Chebil, A.
Efficiency is a very important factor of productivity growth, especially in Egypt, a developing agricultural economy where natural resources (mainly water and land) are limited, and opportunities for developing better technologies have recently started. This study aims first to measure the Egyptian farm specific technical efficiency of the overall use of inputs, and especially of irrigation water use, through the estimation of the stochastic frontier crop and water crop Cobb Douglas production functions for cotton, maize and wheat; and second to compare the stochastic results of measuring technical efficiences with those obtained by applying the deterministic method as a second estimation method. The frontier functions were estimated from a data survey conducted in Northern Egypt for 1993-1994. The results of the stochastic method show that there is a large spread of efficiencies but in general there is a high degree of efficiency, especially in the overall use of all inputs where the average technical efficiency ranges between 88 percent for wheat and 92 percent for maize, with 95 percent of the sample farm being at least 80 percent efficient for the three crops. The farm sample is 10-20 percent less efficient in the use of irrigation water than the overall input use. Modern technology, family size and education (in the wheat case) were identified as determinants of technical efficiency. The comparison made with measures of technical efficiency using stochastic and deterministic frontier models suggested that the two methods yield significantly different efficiency levels across farms. In general the deterministic model results in 20-40 percent lower efficiency measures than the stochastic model.
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