Browsing by Author "Rasi, Janne"

In this research, the productivity change of piglet production on ProAgria Annual Pig Accounting farms (Finnish pig farms exploiting this particular advisory service) is measured from 2003 to 2008, using Fisher productivity index. Moreover, an exact decomposition method is applied in order to obtain a more detailed picture of factors contributing to productivity change. The examined components are changes in technology, technical efficiency, allocative efficiency, scale efficiency and price effect. Indices are formed in two ways: as aggregated indices and geometric means of farmlevel indices. The two indices provide almost identical average annual productivity growth rates, 2.7 % and 2.8 %, respectively, although the growth patterns slightly differ. Scale efficiency is found to be the most important factor contributing to production growth. Aggregated scale efficiency improves by 1.6 % per annum and the mean scale efficiency by 2.1 % per annum. Another component having a remarkable effect on productivity growth is technical efficiency change. Both aggregated and mean index rise by 1.4 % per annum. On the contrary, technological change is slightly negative, on average -0.1 % per year. However, annual changes are noteworthy. Both allocative efficiency change and price effect have little impact on productivity change. Growing average number of sows seems to be a major cause contributing to productivity change, seeing that it is closely connected with improving scale efficiency. Regressive technological change is an alarming result because technological change is the most important element evoking productivity growth in the long term.