ENVIRONMENTAL AND TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY ANALYSIS IN BITTER GOURD PRODUCTION

The present research article is designed to determine technical and environmental efficiency using a data set of bitter gourd growers taken from two districts of the Punjab province of Pakistan. Fertilizer and pesticide inputs are treated as environmental detrimental inputs in bitter gourd production. Stochastic frontier production function is used to measure technical efficiency whereas environmental efficiency is estimated as the input-oriented technical efficiency of inputs, fertilizer and pesticide. The mean technical efficiency is found to be 0.64 and the mean environmental efficiency scores are 0.69 for chemical fertilizer and 0.06 for pesticide, showing huge potential to reduce the application of these inputs. Results show that bitter gourd growers can make less use of environmental contaminating inputs while without any impact on yield. Since environmentally friendly produced vegetables are getting preference of consumers and policymakers, this paper provides an insight into production of such type of vegetable production in the country.