Soil Conservation and Small-Scale Food Production in Highland Ethiopia: A Stochastic Metafrontier Approach

This study used the newly developed metafrontier approach to assess the technical efficiency of small-scale food production in the Ethiopian highlands at plot level, in order to investigate the role of soil conservation technology in enhancing agricultural productivity.

Stochastic frontier estimations showed that plots with soil and water conservation technologies are relatively more efficient than plots without soil conservation. Studying the aspects in which a given soil and water conservation technology affects efficiency could shed light on why laboratory-effective conservation technologies underperform in the real world.