Technical efficiency of the Ugandan matoke farms

Abstract

The issues of measurement of technical efficiency in the production of matoke in Uganda are investigated. A Cobb-Douglas functional form is used to represent the underlying production technology and corrected least squares procedure to estimate the model and the farm-specific measures of technical efficiency. The data consists of a crossection of 288 matoke-producing family farms during the crop year 1990–1991. The productive performance of farms are compared according to the size of land. The impact of various production characteristics on the production structure of the farms is also tested. The empirical results from a comparison of different farm sizes show very small variations in mean efficiency between the different size classes. Some variations in the distribution of farms within each size-class are observed. The mean technical efficiency is found to be 65%.