Dynamics of Agricultural Productivity and Technical Efficiency in Togo: The Role of Technological Change

In the search for ways to boost agricultural productivity for the take-off of the so-advocated agricultural transformation, we investigate in this paper whether there is room under current technologies to boost agricultural productivity through technical efficiency, focusing on the five administrative regions of Togo. We use a regional stochastic frontier model, which assumes that farmers maximize return to the outlay in order to account for potential endogeneity and regional heterogeneities to a panel data for the period 2000-2014. The findings reveal that technical efficiency in agriculture varies considerably across regions and over time. In addition, our results indicate that the country can rely on irrigation intensification to sustain its move towards higher agricultural technical efficiency, while higher rainfall variability puts additional pressure on the achievement of such objective. The policy message drawn from this study supports policy strategies designed to promote irrigation and increased rainfall variability management tools, such as weather insurance, as sound agricultural technical efficiency driven options.