Technical efficiency of rice production in Thailand: copula-based stochastic frontier model

Abstract

The study aims to investigate Thai rice production efficiency with the copula-based stochastic frontier model to draft general statistical data for Thai agriculture development in the future. The empirical results show that land and fertilizer have an indisputably positive and significant effect on rice production. The SFM with Gaussian copula has the lowest value regarding to AIC. The best average TE score belongs to the northern region followed by the central region, the north-eastern region, and the southern region with their average scores of 0.86, 0.819, 0.76 and 0.74, respectively. The interesting point is that, even with highest efficiency score, there is the largest gap between the highest and the lowest scores within central region provinces, followed by north-eastern, central and northern regions with their values of 0.2, 0.18, 0.15 and 0.08, respectively.