Application of DEA and SFA on the Measurement of Agricultural Technical Efficiency in MENA1 Countries

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the levels of technical efficiency in agricultural sector of MENA countries by using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) approaches in 2007-2008. The results show that the total average of technical efficiency is as follows: DEABCC(0.770) > DEACCR(0.744) > SFA(0.479), and among all MENA countries, the best performance in both models is related to Qatar. Furthermore, the empirical results indicate that both the parametric and non-parametric methods provide the same rank of countries; However, in all cases SFA results are lower than those found by using DEA, which expresses high levels of random error in the data