A COMPARATIVE STOCHASTIC FRONTIER ANALYSIS OF IRRIGATED AND RAIN-FED POTATO FARMS IN EASTERN ETHIOPIA
Creators: name: Melesse, Kumilachew Alamerie
name: Ahmed, Musa Hasen
name: Melesse, Kumilachew Alamerie
name: Ahmed, Musa Hasen
Publisher: name: Unknown
Year: 2015
Subjects: subject: Agribusiness
subject: Agricultural and Food Policy
subject: Agricultural Finance
subject: Community/Rural/Urban Development
subject: Consumer/Household Economics
subject: Crop Production/Industries
subject: Demand and Price Analysis
subject: Environmental Economics and Policy
subject: Farm Management
subject: Financial Economics
subject: Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety
subject: Food Security and Poverty
subject: Health Economics and Policy
subject: Industrial Organization
subject: Institutional and Behavioral Economics
subject: International Development
subject: International Relations/Trade
subject: Labor and Human Capital
subject: Land Economics/Use
subject: Livestock Production/Industries
subject: Marketing
subject: FOS: Economics and business
subject: Political Economy
subject: Production Economics
subject: Productivity Analysis
subject: Public Economics
subject: Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies
subject: Research Methods/ Statistical Methods
subject: Resource /Energy Economics and Policy
subject: Risk and Uncertainty
subject: Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession
subject: irrigation
subject: rain-fed
subject: technical effi ciency
subject: stochastic frontier
subject: PSM
subject: potato

description: Irrigation development has been considered as one of the viable strategies for achieving food security. Accordingly, the government of Ethiopia has been increasing water resource development and utilization. However, to what extent the irrigation users are better off than rainfall dependent counterparts on their technical effi ciency (TE) and variability in productivity among the farmers is not well known. Therefore, this study compared the technical effi ciency of farmers who are producing potato under irrigation and through rainfall in Eastern Ethiopia. Propensity Score Matching was applied to select irrigated farms with comparable attributes to rain-fed farms to see the true effi ciency diff erences between the two groups. Cobb-Douglas production function was fi tted using the stochastic production frontier for both irrigated and rain fed farming. The result indicated that irrigated farms have high ineffi ciencies compared with the rain-fed farms. This indicates the existence of considerable potential for increasing output by improving the effi ciency of irrigated farms than rain-fed farms. Among the factors hypothesized to determine the level of TE, landholding, family size and extension contact were found to have a signifi cant eff ect on irrigated farms whereas, landholding, non/off income, farm income, livestock size and extension contact were the determinants in rain-fed farms. This indicates that factors that aff ect technical effi - ciency in irrigated farms are not necessarily the same as rain fed farms. Therefore, it is important to consider both farms groups in evaluating strategies aimed at improving technical effi ciency of smallholder farmers