Analysis of productive performance of crop production systems: An integrated analytical framework

This article presents a new two-stage analytical framework to analyse the productive efficiency of crop production systems. In the first stage, crop growth and economic production models are estimated to calculate three measures of productive efficiency: (1) agronomic efficiency, as the ratio of actual yield to potential yield; (2) technical efficiency (TE), as the ratio of actual yield to best practice yield; and (3) agro-economic efficiency (AgEcE), as the ratio of best practice yield to potential yield. In the second stage, TE and AgEcE are analysed in relation to economic, institutional, social and technological factors that cause farm and spatial heterogeneity. The framework was illustrated through an empirical analysis of rice production in Sri Lanka.

► A new framework is proposed to analyse the productive efficiency of production systems.
► Three measures of efficiency are defined: technical, agronomic and agro-economic efficiency.
► All factors of farm and spatial heterogeneity can be incorporated in this integrated framework.
► The location-specific physical factors are not modelled symmetrically as other economic inputs in economic production models.
► Climate change and agronomic advancements can be incorporated in developing “forward-looking” productive efficiency measures.