Zusammenfassung

How "efficient" are dairy farms in mountain areas? In: 12th Congress of the European Association of Agricultural Economists - EAAE 2008

Pure Technical Efficiency scores of Austrian dairy farms are estimated econometrically on the

basis of data envelopment analysis and bootstrapping. In a second stage, using the same as-sumptions on the distribution of error terms, the distances of farms to their production possibility curve are estimated as functions of farm attributes. Since some of these attributes refer to natu-ral conditions which are more or less unfavourable, the farms in the sample are facing individual frontiers. The distinction between sectorial and individual frontiers gives rise to a distinction

between "overall" and "firm-level" efficiency. Using overall efficiency for the calculation of possi-ble savings from a move to the frontier will overestimate these savings and underestimate the efficiency of a farm relative to the conditions in which it operates