Measuring Technical, Allocative and Economic Efficiency and Productivity of Farming Sub-sector of Iran with Emphasis on Irrigated Watermelon

This paper attempts to measure the technical، allocative and economic efficiency and productivity of irrigated watermelon growers of 12 provinces of the country using non-parametric method of data envelopment analysis (DEA) and Malmquist index for the years of 2005-2010. For this purpose، the input-based method was used with three inputs and one output. The results showed that the average technical، allocative and economic efficiency of irrigated watermelon growers of the provinces of the country was 79. 4 percent for the years of 2005-2010. The average allocative and economic efficiency were 75. 9 and 61. 5 percent، respectively. This suggests that the irrigated watermelon growers have not the appropriate level of the mentioned performances in the selected provinces of the country. The calculation of efficiency of the selected provinces shows that four provinces experienced a ppositive growth on average and other provinces experienced negative growth on average during the years of 2005-2010. So that by study of provincial productivity ranking، it was observed that the provinces of Sistan and Baluchistan and Hamadan had the highest and the lowest productivity in the production of irrigated watermelon compared to other provinces، On the other hand، the productivity values of provinces showed that the appropriate productivity of the selected provinces was mostly due to the changes in technical efficiency.