Abstract:

The main aim of the paper is to evaluate European farms technical efficiency and to analyze the difference in scale efficiency over time and among farms. This study is based on the data contained in the Farm Accounting Data Network and covers the years 2007 and 2012. DMUs are average farms representing 128 European re¬gions from the EU member states. The estimation of technical efficiency was conducted using the data envelopment analysis (DEA), per total and separately for each size classes selected (based on UAA). The main findings indicate that with actual inputs a European farm can produce 37.9% more outputs and they could increase their relative efficiency by 10.7%. Moreover, from 128 farms only 34 farms (25.6%) are efficient (CRS) and the majority of farms have an increasing return to scale which means that they obtain more outputs by increasing inputs. On the other hand, contrary to the relatively common opinion that bigger size promotes higher efficiency, it was found that the very large farms from European regions are characterized by low pure technical ef¬ficiency and the farms with 10-20 ha and 50-100 ha have higher scale efficiency and technical efficiency.