Productivity, efficiency and technological change in French agriculture during 2002-2014: A Färe-Primont index decomposition

The objective of the article is to assess productivity change in French agriculture during2002-2014, namely total factor productivity (TFP) change and its componentstechnological change and efficiency change.On recent period, existing studies on this topic report contradictory results. For numerousyears, most of the papers dedicated to TFP change analysis have used the classic Malmquistmeasures of TFP. By contrast, in this paper we use the Färe-Primont index (O’Donnell,2011) to compute TFP and its components, based on non-parametric Data EnvelopmentAnalysis (DEA) (Charnes et al., 1978). Productivity measures of a decision making unit(DMU) that can be expressed as the ratio of an output quantity change index on an inputquantity change index, can be referred to as ‘multiplicatively complete’ (O’Donnell, 2008).Indeed, the Färe-Primont index verifies the multiplicatively completeness property and isalso transitive, allowing for multi-temporal/lateral comparisons. This paper applies for thefirst time to French micro-economic farm data the more rigorous Färe-Primont TFP index.Moreover, we extend the Färe-Primont to the meta-frontier framework in order to comparethe technology gap change between different types of farming