Analysis of Factors Affecting Productivity and Efficiency of Maize Production in Mecha Woreda, Ethiopia

Mengistu, Yismaw

dc.contributor.author	Mengistu, Yismaw
dc.date.accessioned	2018-05-14T04:54:12Z
dc.date.available	2018-05-14T04:54:12Z
dc.date.issued	2018-05
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/8720
dc.description.abstract	Many sources expressed that African agriculture was almost identical to that of South America and comparable to Asia since 1960s. However, African agriculture now is characterized by very low productivity and vicious circle problems. Ethiopia places high priority to break this vicious circle problems and poverty through increasing agricultural productivity by focusing on selected and strategic food crops such as maize, though the result is not satisfactory. A number of studies tried to explain low productivity and variability of maize production in Ethiopia. However, few studies have looked at the factors affecting efficiency of maize production. And even much of those studies focused on technical efficiency of farmers while giving little attention to allocative and economic efficiency of farmers. Then, by considering these facts and problems, the paper was conducted to study factors affecting productivity and efficiency of maize production in Mecha woreda. And in order to achieve the major objective as well as to answer the preliminary research questions, the study was conducted on primary data which was collected from 198 respondents of Mecha woreda maize farmers. For the analysis of the collected data the study used both descriptive and econometrics methods. For those methods, SPSS version 20 and STATA version 12 were used as a tool of analysis. From 11 explanatory variables employed in stochastic frontier regression model; livestock and labour were the most determinant of maize productivity with respective elasticity coefficients of 0.22% and 0.18%. DAP and land were other inputs which affect maize productivity with approximately equal (0.17%) elasticity coefficient. And also the estimated Tobit regression result verified that land fragmentation and distance from the main market were the key factors which affect efficiency of maize farmers negatively. And age of the household head was another factor which affects TE of maize farmers adversely but it affects AE of maize farmers positively. The mean value of TE, AE and EE of maize farmers in the study area were 77.16%, 16.51% and 12.11%, respectively. The results showed that there is a huge gap between the lowest and highest efficiency farmers. Therefore, the policies and strategies in development and research may act on these variables to increase productivity and efficiency level of maize producer farmers.	en_US
dc.subject	ECONOMICS	en_US
dc.title	Analysis of Factors Affecting Productivity and Efficiency of Maize Production in Mecha Woreda, Ethiopia	en_US
dc.type	Thesis	en_US