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Soil conservation and technical efficiency among hillside farmers in Central America: a switching regression model *
Author(s) -
Solís Daniel,
BravoUreta Boris E.,
Quiroga Ricardo E.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
australian journal of agricultural and resource economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.683
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-8489
pISSN - 1364-985X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8489.2007.00394.x
Subject(s) - agricultural economics , production (economics) , economics , regression , regression analysis , econometrics , soil conservation , elasticity (physics) , mathematics , geography , statistics , microeconomics , agriculture , materials science , archaeology , composite material
The main objective of this paper is to evaluate and analyse technical efficiency (TE) levels for hillside farmers under different levels of adoption of soil conservation in El Salvador and Honduras. A switching regression model is implemented to examine potential selectivity bias for high and low level adopters, and separate stochastic production frontiers, corrected for selectivity bias, are estimated for each group. The main results indicate that households with above‐average adoption show statistically higher average TE than those with lower adoption. Households with higher adoption have smaller farms and display the highest partial output elasticity for land. Constraints in the land and credit markets are likely explanations for these differences. In addition, all estimated models show that TE has a positive and significant association with education and extension.