Productivity, efficiency and technological change in French agriculture during 2002-2014: A Färe-Primont index decomposition

The objective of the article is to assess productivity change in French agriculture during 2002-2014, namely total factor productivity (TFP) change and its components technological change and efficiency change. For this, we use the economically-ideal Fare-Primont index which verifies the multiplicatively completeness property and is also transitive, allowing for multi-temporal/lateral comparisons. To compare the technology gap change between the six types of farming considered, we extend the Fare-Primont to the meta-frontier framework. Results indicated that during 2002-2014, all farms had a TFP progress. Pig/poultry farms had the lowest TFP increase while beef farms had the highest (19.1%). The latter had the strongest increase in efficiency change, while technological progress was the highest for mixed farms. The meta-frontier analysis indicates that field crop farms’ technology is the most productive of all types of farming.