Analysis of productive performance of crop production systems: An integrated analytical framework

This article presents a new two-stage analytical framework to analyse the productive efficiency of crop production systems. In the first stage, crop growth and economic production models are estimated to calculate three measures of productive efficiency: (1) agronomic efficiency, as the ratio of actual yield to potential yield; (2) technical efficiency (TE), as the ratio of actual yield to best practice yield; and (3) agro-economic efficiency (AgEcE), as the ratio of best practice yield to potential yield. In the second stage, TE and AgEcE are analysed in relation to economic, institutional, social and technological factors that cause farm and spatial heterogeneity. The framework was illustrated through an empirical analysis of rice production in Sri Lanka.