How credible are estimates of peasant allocative scale, or scope efficiency? A commentary

Abstract

The bulk of the rapidly growing literature on the efficiency of peasant farmers around the world points to considerable economic inefficiencies, countering the Schultzian hypothesis of ‘poor but efficient’ producers in low-income agriculture. This commentary highlights several crucial weaknesses in contemporary methods of estimating economic efficiency parameters. While the efficiency of peasant producers is an issue of considerable policy importance, the methodological shortcomings of efficiency estimation render most exciting empirical findings uninformative. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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