Rangeland cattle production in Uruguay: Single-output versus multi-output efficiency measures

Abstract

Rangeland cattle production is the largest agricultural sector of Uruguay. Ranches produce up to three products (beef, sheep-meat, and wool) usually combined into an equivalent meat (EM) index. The objective is to compare the empirical results from the estimation of a single output stochastic production frontier (SPF) and a multi-output stochastic ray frontier (SRF) to provide insights on the useof the EM index to evaluate ranches performance. Results show similar efficiency scores. The average level of TE is 0.769 for the SPF and 0.779 for the SRF. We cannot discard EM index as a simple measure of combined production.