Farm Size And Efficiency Nexus

Abstract

Research background: Many studies have reported the relationship between farm size and productivity. Whilst somemeta-regressions on efficiency have been published, none has addressed the issue of farm size efficiency relative to thedimensions of productive efficiency and its variants.Purpose of the article: We investigated the effect of farm size on productivity in Ghanaian agriculture within a meta regression framework.Methods: Using data on 93 primary studies with 177 observations on efficiency in agriculture in Ghana, the OrdinaryLeast Squares estimator was applied in estimating the meta-regression model, a form of meta-analysis that speciallyformulated to assess empirical economics research. The farm size–efficiency effects were computed based on the Wald.Findings, value added & novelty: The results were mixed. Whilst no farm size-efficiency nexus was established forallocative and scale efficiencies, the inverse effect was confirmed in the case of the cost-economic, profit, technical andmetafrontier technical efficiencies. Improved technology would be compatible with reduced farm size, reduction of thetechnology gap that would move farmers closer to the metafrontier. We contribute to the farm size-efficiency debate aswe performed a quantitative review of the farm size-efficiency relationship. We addressed the farm size-efficiencyrelationship within the meta-regression framework and accounted for the full range of efficiency measures. Unlike othermeta-regressions that used the standard error of the estimates, we obtained additional effect size, that for farm size efficiency, our key result, from the specified model. We then dissociated the effect size into the range of efficiencymeasures reported in the primary studies. The paper covers data on farming in Ghana.