The efficiency of agricultural marketing cooperatives in China's Zhejiang province

Abstract

On the basis of the bootstrap-Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), this paper estimates technical, scale, and pure technical efficiencies for the agricultural marketing cooperatives in China's Zhejiang Province and employs a single truncated bootstrap procedure to identify the key determinants of efficiencies. The empirical results suggest that pure technical inefficiency was the main source of the technical inefficiency. Factors having significantly positive impacts on efficiency of cooperatives are local economic development level, entrepreneurship of managers, and human capital of members. The size of financial leverage and the number of board members have a negative impact on pure technical efficiency. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.