Technical Efficiency of Boro Rice Production in Meherpur District of Bangladesh: A Stochastic Frontier Approach

Abstract

Rice is the dominant food crop in Bangladesh. Like Aman and Aus varieties, Boro rice also grows in leaps and bounds in the country. The production of Boro rice during the dry season is welcomed as increasing use of irrigation in the country is expected to raise Boro rice production for achieving food self sufficiency. This study estimates the technical efficiency of Boro rice farms and determines the important factors affecting the level of technical inefficiency of the farms. This study mainly uses primary data for the analysis, collected from 112 rice producing farms of Jhenaidah district using multistage random sampling technique. The Cobb-Douglas stochastic production frontier approach is employed to estimate the technical efficiency of Boro rice farms. An inefficiency effect model is also used to determine the factors that affect the level of inefficiency of the Boro rice farms. The empirical results of the Cobb-Douglas stochastic production frontier approach show that the technical efficiency of Boro rice production is on average 0.92. This indicates that the level of technical efficiency in the study area is high. It also finds that cost of labor, irrigation, seed and ploughing are the important factors which affect increasing efficiency of Boro rice production. The results from the estimated inefficiency effect model reveal that farm size, age, education, training and credit facility are the significant factors which are negatively related to technical inefficiency of Boro rice production. This study suggests that steps to increase education, training and credit facilities are instrumental to reduce technical inefficiency of rice production in the study area.