Evangelos Papanagiotou

Assessing productivity change with SFA in the sheep sector of Greece

The objective of this paper is to measure total factor productivity growth in a panel of sheep farms in Greece and assess the relative contribution of technical change, technical efficiency change and scale efficiency change in observed productivity growth. Such decomposition can be useful in planning well defined policies which can support the sector’s sustainable development via the optimization of input/output use. A stochastic frontier production function approach is adopted and maximum likelihood is used to estimate the parameters. The data used for the econometric estimation are obtained from the Greek Farm Accounting Data Network for the period 1997–2002. TFP has been growing in the sector but at a diminishing rate. The major determinant of productivity growth is technical change, which has been shifting the frontier by 2.4% on average during this period, but is counteracted to some extent by technical and scale inefficiency each reducing TFP growth by about 0.3% p.a.

Sustainable Farming Systems vs Conventional Agriculture: A Socioeconomic Approach

Athanasios Theocharopoulos1, Stamatis Aggelopoulos1, Panoraia Papanagiotou2, Katerina Melfou3 and Evangelos Papanagiotou2 1Department of Agricultural Development and Agribusiness Management, Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki 2Department of Agricultural Economics, School of Agriculture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki 3Department of Agricultural Products Marketing and Quality Control, TEI of Western Macedonia, Florina Branch, Florina Greece

Economic Performance of Quality Labeled Saffron in Greece

Abstract The aim of this paper is to examine the economic performance of Greek PDO saffron farms by estimating their technical efficiency with the application of DEA methodology. The survey was conducted in 2012-2013 in the PDO designated area of Kozani in Western Macedonia, which is the only area the product is being cultivated. Data were collected with personal interviews by means of a structured questionnaire, from a sample of 100 saffron farms. Results indicate that average technical efficiency under constant returns to scale is 0.627 in the sample and farms could have achieved the same level of output using 37% less inputs.