Abstract
Purpose: The study is conducted to determine the relative efficiency of resource use in rice ‘Bora’ production in Gopalganj Sadar Upazila of Bangladesh on the basis of primary data.
Design/methodology/approach: Data has been collected from 80 rice farmers using systematic random sampling. This paper examines the inter-resource use efficiency of rice production and for analysis both Ordinary Least Square and Maximum likelihood Estimators is used to estimate output elasticity of resources used in production function Again, value of marginal product of different variables is used to estimate the resource use efficiency and relative efficiency of the input used. Land, labor, fertilizer, pesticide, seed and irrigation are considered as independent variables while output is treated as dependent variable.
Findings: The result indicates that only pesticide is being underutilized, whereas, land, labor, fertilizer, seed and irrigation are being over utilized. It is found from analysis that there is a probability of increase in output if the farmers reduce to some extent of those resources which are now being over utilizing. Any increase in use of pesticide may positively affect the production of rice. It is also found that none of the resources is efficiently utilized but seed is relatively efficient in utilization.
Practical implications: This research can be used by the researchers who are interested in productivity analysis and can be helpful for policy makers in increasing the amount of rice production without increasing amount of cultivatable land, and efficient utilization of the existing resources.