Economic Analysis of Agricultural Investments

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a modification of a standardfour input production process where energy is used in an inefficient way due topartly unnecessary waste of energy. The changes in production efficiencyinvestigated using stochastic frontier methods, show declining technicalefficiency in livestock production and especially low marginal contribution oflabor inputs. The number of workers, size of farm, and distance from nearestcity are related to efficiency in agricultural production. It is well known thatresults from an environmental policy in response to global climate change arequite sensitive to the assumption on the rate of energy efficiency improvements.However, technical progress is traditionally considered as a non-economicvariable in economic policy models. It is exogenous in most policy evaluationsas well as in the theory of environmental economics.