Dynamic efficiency and resource productivity of oil palm smallholders in Jambi, Indonesia - a non-parametric analysis

The master thesis assesses total factor productivity change, total resource productivity change and technical efficiency change of Indonesian oil palm smallholders. The study relies on production data and a plot level biodiversity account of about 30 farmers, collected in three waves from 2012 to 2018. First, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is used to calculate Malmquist Productivity Indices (MPI) based on usage of typical production inputs. Second, by means of a non-parametric Directional Distance Function (DDF) approach, technical inefficiency measures are obtained. Besides productive inputs, biodiversity loss is included as an undesired output to additionally describe natural resource productivity. Preliminary results indicate that (i) technical change progressed on average, most likely due to adoption of higher yielding varieties,. (ii) technical efficiency also improved slightly in response to better farming practices. (iii) Resource productivity decreased reflecting an acceleration of biodiversity reduction in proportion to the technical change and technical efficiency change increase. Strong El Niño effects can be found in all respective measures for the year of 2015. It is shown that improving technology and efficiency affects biodiversity on the plots ambiguously.

After completing my master studies I continue my reasearch in the project C07 as a Doctroal Researcher.