Measuring Technical Efficiency and Productivity Growth: A Comparison of DEA and SFA on Regional and Crop-Specific Production Data

This study examines productivity growth of 3 ECOWAS crops, namely, rice, cotton and millet, using both Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) and Data Envelopment analysis (DEA). The results show that the magnitude of productivity progress vary across models applied and by segmentation of the data set. Nevertheless, the overall results indicate that technical change has had the greatest impact on productivity and producers have tendencies to catch-up with front runners.