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This paper discusses and illustrates the analytical foundations of international comparisons (or benchmarking) for assessing a country's potential for improvement along various dimensions of social and economic development. By providing a methodology for international benchmarking, discussing various alternatives and choices, and presenting a cross-country illustration, the paper can help practitioners be less arbitrary and more systematic in their approach to international comparisons, as well as more realistic in their expectations for a country's improvement. The paper presents the stochastic frontier approach and applies it to estimate feasible frontiers or benchmarks for each variable, country, and year. It then interprets a country's (one-sided) departure from the benchmark as inefficiency or potential for improvement. This contrasts with the literature that compares countries by looking at raw variables or indicators, without considering that countries differ in structural endowments that constrain the maximum performance that a country could achieve in a policy-relevant horizon. The Stochastic Frontier approach also improves upon the literature that uses regression residuals to measure performance. Regression residuals are hard to interpret as inefficiency, because they are mixed with noise and take positive and negative values. As an illustration, the paper uses a panel of 142 countries with yearly data for 2005-14 and considers a set of 10 development indicators. It finds that the potential for improvement does not follow a simple relationship with economic development, with some lower-income countries being closer to their own feasible frontier than more advanced countries are.

Benchmarking --- Country Diagnostics --- Economic Development --- Economic Growth --- Economic Theory and Research --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Stochastic Frontier --- Structural Endowment

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This paper examines the agricultural productivity-farm size relationship in the context of Bangladesh. Features of Bangladesh's agriculture help overcome several limitations in testing the inverse farm size-productivity relationship in other developing country settings. A stochastic production frontier model is applied using data from three rounds of a household panel survey to estimate simultaneously the production frontier and the technical inefficiency functions. The "correlated random effects" approach is used to control for unobserved heterogeneous household effects. Methodologically, the results suggest that the stochastic production frontier models that ignore the inefficiency function are likely mis-specified, and may result in misleading conclusions on the farm size-productivity relationship. Empirically, the findings confirm that the farm size and productivity relationship is negative, but with the inverse relationship diminishing over time. Total factor productivity growth, driven by technical change, is found to have been robust across the sample. Across farm size groups, the relatively larger farmers experienced faster technical change, which helped them to catch up and narrow the productivity gap with the smaller farmers.

Agriculture --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Food Security --- Labor Markets --- Productivity --- Rural Development --- Rural Labor Markets --- Social Protections and Labor --- Stochastic Frontier --- Technical Change

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A l’heure du développement de l’intelligence artificielle, de la dématérialisation de l’économie ou encore de la robotisation toujours plus importante des processus de production, l’éducation est devenue en peu de temps, un domaine d’investissement crucial pour les pouvoirs publics soucieux d’assurer la compétitivité de leur tissu économique évoluant dans un environnement toujours plus concurrentiel. 

L’objectif de ce mémoire est d’utiliser les données de l’enquête PISA 2015 afin de trouver dans un premier temps quels sont les déterminants explicatifs des résultats moyens obtenus par les élèves âgés de 15 ans provenant d’Allemagne, de Belgique, de France et d’Italie. 

Après avoir vérifié la pertinence des variables explicatives grâce aux estimations par la méthode des moindres carrés ordinaires, nous utiliserons le modèle des frontières stochastiques de production afin d’évaluer et de comparer les niveaux d’efficience des pays repris dans notre échantillon.

Efficiency --- Education system --- Stochastic Frontier Analysis --- PISA --- Efficience --- Système éducatif --- Sciences économiques & de gestion > Domaines particuliers de l'économie (santé, travail, transport...)

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Increasingly, entrepreneurship is being discussed and considered as a source of high economic growth and competitiveness. A conceptual process of creative construction that characterizes the dynamics between entrants and incumbents can prove quite useful to analyze the impact of countries' entrepreneurship capital on economic performance and can be a guide for economic policy. This paper applies a Stochastic Frontier Analysis approach to test the hypothesis that entrepreneurship capital promotes economic performance by serving as a conduit of knowledge spillovers. In addition, kernel density functions are employed to analyze convergence (or divergence) in the efficiency estimated for individual countries. The empirical evidence and results here tend to support the hypothesis. Specifically, the empirical analysis shows that the rate of expenditure on research and development in relation to new businesses registered has a positive and significant effect in increasing technical efficiency. These factors facilitate the dissemination of existing knowledge, develop entrepreneurship capital, and thus provide the missing link to economic performance-entrepreneurship capital. The authors also show the trends and dynamics of changes in countries' technical efficiency.

Agricultural Knowledge & Information Systems --- E-Business --- Economic Theory & Research --- Entrepreneurship Capital --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Knowledge for Development --- Labor Policies --- Private Sector Development --- Stochastic Frontier Analysis (Sfa) --- Technical Efficiency

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The agri-market is one of the core sectors of the economy, responsible for producing goods and the fulfilment of nutritional needs. It includes agriculture, which produces food, and the food industry, which involves processing agricultural products. Therefore, it is crucial to analyze the development of agri-markets on both local and international scales. International trade is an important factor affecting the availability of agri-food products. Consequently, it is also important to evaluate economic factors and their roles in the development of a region. This Special Issue aims to solicit original contributions from academics, practitioners and other stakeholders, providing theoretical and empirical analyses focusing on agricultural markets and rural development. The editor encourages submissions that present applications of statistical analysis, case studies, and novel methodologies from parametric and non-parametric related to the topic of the Special Issue. The scope of submission includes original research and review articles on the theme.

Development economics & emerging economies --- economy --- sustainable development --- wine routes --- Axarquía --- rural tourism --- economic sociology --- geographical indication --- European Union --- Mercosur --- market arena --- e-retail --- comparative approach --- import risks --- agricultural products --- agro-trade --- food import --- SAW --- TOPSIS --- geometric means --- financial autonomy --- TOPSIS method --- rural municipalities --- municipal firms --- business --- economic evaluation --- local self-government --- cassava price --- volatility --- Bayesian --- GARCH-X --- Thailand --- correlation --- detrended cross-correlation analysis --- meat prices --- time series --- agriculture --- fruit products --- tariff rate quota --- welfare --- trade policy --- TRQ administration --- palm oil price --- domestic shocks --- foreign shocks --- Malaysia --- SVAR model --- interest-free community investment fund --- rural women empowerment --- case study --- logit model --- endogenous stochastic frontier --- crop insurance --- viticulture --- spatial integration --- market --- cointegration --- milk --- dairy products --- Poland --- Czechia --- Common Market Organization --- wine --- third countries --- measure of promotion --- wineries --- Common Agricultural Policy --- Indigofera spp. cultivation --- indigo paste production --- economic contribution --- land suitability --- development strategy