EFFICIENCY AND OWNERSHIP IN SLOVENE DAIRYING - A COMPARISON OF ECONOMETRIC AND PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES

This study uses farm-level panel data to compare the productive effici ency of four cooperative and twelve private dairy farms in the former Yugoslav Republic of Slovenia, over the period 1974 to 1990. The data suggest that although some choice regarding the economic organization of enterprises had been allowed in Yugoslavia, the restrictions on pri vate farming led to a dual economy. Panel data estimation of a Cobb-Do uglas frontier production function serves as a check on the validity o f the data and is complemented by programming techniques that allow th e efficiency differences to be decomposed into technical and scale eff ects. The efficiency changes and the rate of technical change give the Malmquist total factor productivity (TFP) index, which is compared to a geometric index of TFP and the econometric estimates of technical c hange. All the approaches show that productivity growth has been faste r in the private sector, which is also more technically efficient, but that the cooperatives remain more productive because the private farm s are far too small. Thus, public or private ownership and control is less of a crucial issue than land reform aimed at improving scale effi ciency. J. Comp. Econom., February 1996, 22(1), pp. 1-22. Birkbeck Col lege, University of London, London W1P 1PA, United Kingdom; University of Reading, Reading RG6 2AR, United Kingdom; and Agricultural Institu te of Slovenia, 61000 Ljubljana, Slovenia. (C) 1996 Academic Press, In c.