Farm size and efficiency nexus

Purpose of the article: We investigated the effect of farm size on productivity in Ghanaian agriculture within a meta-regression framework.
Methods: Using data on 93 primary studies with 177 observations on efficiency in agriculture in Ghana, the Ordinary Least Squares estimator was applied in estimating the meta-regression model, a form of meta-analysis that specially formulated to assess empirical economics research. The farm size–efficiency effects were computed based on the Wald.
Findings, value added & novelty: The results were mixed. Whilst no farm size-efficiency nexus was established for allocative and scale efficiencies, the inverse effect was confirmed in the case of the cost-economic, profit, technical and metafrontier technical efficiencies. Improved technology would be compatible with reduced farm size, reduction of the technology gap that would move farmers closer to the metafrontier. We contribute to the farm size-efficiency debate as we performed a quantitative review of the farm size-efficiency relationship. We addressed the farm size-efficiency relationship within the meta-regression framework and accounted for the full range of efficiency measures. Unlike other meta-regressions that used the standard error of the estimates, we obtained additional effect size, that for farm size-efficiency, our key result, from the specified model. We then dissociated the effect size into the range of efficiency measures reported in the primary studies. The paper covers data on farming in Ghana.