The Great Plains is the most important wheat producing region in the United States. Dwindling returns and changes in government farm programs have reduced wheat acreage, raising concerns over its future viability. Small farms and marginal areas are particularly vulnerable, including the western Great Plains (WGP). To assess the technical and economic viability of wheat farms, the efficiency of 141 wheat farms in the WGP was estimated. Results found substantial inefficiency among all producer types. The largest source of inefficiency was input use among smaller farms. The smaller farms were the most scale efficient, reducing concerns over their future viability.

The U.S. hog industry has experienced dramatic structural changes and rapid increases in farm productivity. A stochastic frontier analysis is used to measure hog enterprise total factor productivity (TFP) growth between 1992 and 2004 and to decompose this growth into technical change and changes in technical efficiency, scale efficiency, and allocative efficiency. Productivity gains over the 12-year period are found to be explained almost entirely by technical progress and by improvements in scale efficiency. Differences in TFP growth rates in the Southeast and Heartland regions were found to be explained primarily by differences in farm size growth rates.

The performance of local tax offices of Norway is studied over a three-year period applying Data Envelopment Efficiency analysis and a Malmquist productivity index. The estimates are bias-corrected using a bootstrap approach recently developed for DEA models. The results show that bias correction and the construction of confidence intervals give a quite different picture without bootstrapping. A set of best practice offices is identified for future work on finding explanations for good performance. The productivity development of individual offices is classified into the four categories: productivity improving cost increase, productivity improving cost savings, productivity decreasing cost savings and productivity decreasing cost increase.