Technical efficiency of Greek olive growing farms: a robust approach with panel data

The assessment of technical efficiency in the agricultural sector and the influence of exogenous (environmental) variables on the production process has been a major topic of economic research especially for managers and policy makers. The methological innovation of the present study involves the impact of environmental variables on efficiency and the utilization of panel data for the empirical analysis. This has been pursued using full nonparametric robust frontier techniques (the alpha-quantile estimator) and a panel data set of olive growing farms in Greece from the Farm Accountancy Data Network of the EU. According to the empirical results, the ratio of owned to total land, the ratio of family to total labor, the degree of specialization, and a farm’s location have a statistically significant impact on performance, which is not constant but varies over the 2006 to 2009 period considered