measuring economic efficiency of kidney bean production using non-discretionary data envelopment analysis

Efficient use of assets in agriculture is a goal for policy-makers and farmers. agricultural input resources are scarce and optimum use of inputs in different agricultural operations is important. data envelopment analysis (dea), as a mathematical programming technique, is a well-known approach for estimating the efficiency of agricultural dmus. in this study, efficiency of kidney bean production in twelve provinces of iran has been studied. inputs are the cost of tillage, planting, cultivation, harvesting and land. output consists of the total production value of the kidney bean. land cost is a non-controllable variable. therefore; a nondiscretionary dea approach is applied to estimate efficiency of kidney bean production. the average value of technical efficiency score of kidney bean production is 0.74. the results of benchmarking of kidney bean farms reveals that 58 percent of them are efficient. these farms are a good example for improving the performance of inefficient farms. for optimum conditions based on the proposed model, tillage, planting, cultivation and harvesting costs is decreased by 34.48%, 11.92%, 27.87% and 7.27%, respectively, without decreasing kidney bean production level.