Measurement of Technical Efficiency of Wet Season Rice Production in Northern Thailand: An Application of DEA Malmquist Index | Biomedgrid

All Thai farmers grow rice as the main crop. Rice production in Thailand plays an important role as an important economic crop. In this paper, to measure the technical efficiency of wet season rice production. The objectives were to analyze the efficiency by using an application of data envelopment analysis and used a panel data by Malmquist Index to identify the trend in wet season rice productivity's change in the crop year 2009/2010 – 2018/2019. The study areas located were in the seventeen provinces in the north of Thailand. The empirical results showed that the average Technical Efficiency (TE) score was 0.892, the highest TE score was 0.920 and the lowest TE score was 0.860 respectively. Phetchabun province provided the best efficiency. Contrary, Tak province where had the worst efficiency among all the producing provinces of wet season rice. Besides, the TE score was not close to 1.000 that it meant a province where was the lowest mean technical efficiency score of wet season rice production. It should be used the resources available to generate a set of outputs. In term of the Total Factor Productivity (TFP) change, an average score of TFP performed a high efficiency (1.003) during the ten years. The scores with greater than 1.000 in eleven which implied an improvement in the efficiency as well as technology. On the other hand, the scores with less than 1.000 was found in six provinces which implied a need to improve performance and technology. Therefore, we concluded that the wet season rice production in Northern Thailand achieved the efficiency improvement, the technical progress and the productivity growth between 2009–2019. Moreover, this study can provide important and useful information for farmers, producers, researchers, policy makers, and government agencies to set the plans for using technology to improve efficiency.