TITLE:
Efficiency Change, Technological Progress and Sources of Long Term Agricultural Productivity Growth in Selected MENA Countries
AUTHORS:
Boubaker Dhehibi, Aymen Frija, Aden Aw-Hassan
KEYWORDS:
Total Factor Productivity, Agricultural Growth, Tornqvist Index, Malmquist Index, Growth Determinants, Tunisia, Jordan, Egypt
JOURNAL NAME:
American Journal of Industrial and Business Management,
Vol.8 No.8,
August
30,
2018
ABSTRACT: We
investigate the factors that affect total factor productivity growth in MENA
countries. To this end, we start first by examining levels and trends in
agricultural outputs and productivity growth using Torqnovist Indexes and then
computing Malmquist Indexes for three MENA countries representing three
different agro-ecological areas; irrigated (Egypt), rainfed (Tunisia) and
rangeland (Jordan) over the period 1961-2012. We make use of data drawn from
the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) dataset. The advantage of this
decomposition is that allows decomposing TFP into its two components, namely
technical efficiency (TEF) and technological change (TECH). The analysis was
complemented by econometric regression of the obtained TECH, considered as the
most important long-run driver of TFP growth, scores on a set of potential
explicative variables. Turning to the
determinants of the components of TECH, the paper findings showed that TFP can
be increased due to the increasing in human capital, share of the main crop
harvested in each country, and resource reallocation-agricultural employment
share. The main implication policy of this research is that growth and
determinants of TFP are essential for assessing the country past and potential
economic performance, and the gains in TFP drive gains in income and growth.