Assessing technical efficiency of Québec dairy farms

The purpose of this paper is twofold. Our first objective is to measure the level of technical efficiency of Québec dairy farms. Our second objective is to gauge the robustness of our results with respect to the selection of a functional form and of a distribution for the inefficiency index. We estimate efficiency frontiers for Cobb-Douglas (C-D), translogarithmic (TL) and generalized Leontief (GL) production functions with half-normal, truncated normal and exponential distributions. Our results, based, on likelihood dominance criterion (LDC) indicate that the GL production technology dominates the other two functional forms, and this ranking is robust to changes in the distribution of the inefficiency index. Efficiency scores and ranks are highly correlated for all the functional forms and distributions. The differences in the mean levels of efficiency are statistically significant across functional forms and distributions, although the magnitude of the difference is minuscule. The very high mean level of efficiency and the low standard deviation confirms that Québec dairy farms are very homogenous in terms of getting the most from their inputs. This is not surprising, given that the sector has been very stable policy- wise and that it has been difficult for dairy farmers to expand. To augment the comparisons, results obtained from data envelopment analysis (DEA), are added to the analysis. In this case, the correlation coefficients between DEA and parametric specifications are found to be very low.