| In a competitive market dairy production will shift to that region which is the most productive. Thus, this paper reports the measurement of productivity of dairy production in the various states of the U.S. using recent Census data and non-parametric Malmquist index techniques. These are total factor productivity measures that do not require the assumption of cost or profit maximization behavior for aggregation. Individual state estimates of changes in efficiency, technology, and productivity from 1987 to 1992 were computed, divided by 1987 values. Over these states the average increase in productivity was 3.6 percent, or about 0.7 percent per year. Almost all of the productivity increase occurred from technological change, since the average increase in... |
