Nonparametric Analysis of Production Efficiency: Discussion

Abstract

When I was invited to be a discussant in this session dealing with nonparametric analysis of production and consumption, my initial response was rather mixed. On one hand, I teach a graduate-level course in applied statistics, and one of the topics I cover is nonparametric statistics and its application to the biological sciences. Hence, I thought it would be interesting to relate what I cover in class with what is used in applied agricultural production economics research. On the other hand, I am not familiar with this approach since I have not used the nonparametric programming method for efficiency analysis in my past research. Thus, together with my graduate students, we started applying the nonparametric production efficiency analysis in order to gain a better understanding of this approach. The deeper we got into the research topic, I realized that there was very little relationship between what is called nonparametric statistics by statisticians and nonparametric methods used to analyze production efficiency.