An Analysis on Korean Pear Farm Efficiency;A case study using non-parametric method

배 농가의 경영효율성 분석;비모수적 접근방법에 의한 사례 연구

The objective of this study was to compare the farm efficiency of members of cooperative firms with that of non-members in Korea. Data were collected from 27 farms members of three cooperatives and 13 non-member farms, based on the managerial achievements of 1999. For the analysis, the data were divided into three different farming types: type I and II of member farms and non-member farms. Economic analysis were implemented using DEA(Data Envelopment Analysis). Major findings was as follows. Total average technology efficiency was 0.782, which implies that there still remains 21.8% of improvement possibility. Among the three types, type I showed the highest technology efficiency of 0.9055, while type II and non-member farms showed 0.7670 and 0.7171, respectively. This means that these farms have relatively high potential improved. Also, comparing technology efficiency by dividing into pure technology and scale efficiency, all type of the farms exhibit a higher pure technology efficiency compared to scale efficiency. Therefore, to improve current technology efficiency, farms need to focus more on pure technology efficiency improvement. Meanwhile, profit analysis based on farm size indicate that most of the farms demonstrated the increasing-return-to-scale, which means it is necessary to extend the farm size to improve technical efficiency. Type I member farms achieve higher profit and efficiency than other two types and relatively higher producer prices through introducing cooperative sorting, grading and packing. Also, these labor saving technologies increased farm size.