This research explores the question of how the three production factors, capital, labor, and land may impact the current level of cotton output on the Harran Plain, a major cotton production area in Turkey. The object...This research explores the question of how the three production factors, capital, labor, and land may impact the current level of cotton output on the Harran Plain, a major cotton production area in Turkey. The objective of this paper is to estimate a Translog production function and compare the results to those from a Cobb-Douglas specification. Nested tests we performed resulted in the conclusion that the constant returns to scale, weak separability and Cobb-Douglas hypotheses are all satisfied. Thus the Cobb-Douglas specification is a superior functional form yielding results more robust than those from the translog model. Dwelling on Cobb-Douglas estimation results, farm size is found the most influential variable determining cotton output, followed by the variable representing capital as the second influential. Results also demonstrate that the returns-to-scale parameter calculated for this sample is not statistically different from unity, suggesting that cotton production technology in this region exhibits constant returns to scale. This result is consistent with current literature findings that render support to an inverse relationship between farm size and productivity in developing countries.展开更多
文摘This research explores the question of how the three production factors, capital, labor, and land may impact the current level of cotton output on the Harran Plain, a major cotton production area in Turkey. The objective of this paper is to estimate a Translog production function and compare the results to those from a Cobb-Douglas specification. Nested tests we performed resulted in the conclusion that the constant returns to scale, weak separability and Cobb-Douglas hypotheses are all satisfied. Thus the Cobb-Douglas specification is a superior functional form yielding results more robust than those from the translog model. Dwelling on Cobb-Douglas estimation results, farm size is found the most influential variable determining cotton output, followed by the variable representing capital as the second influential. Results also demonstrate that the returns-to-scale parameter calculated for this sample is not statistically different from unity, suggesting that cotton production technology in this region exhibits constant returns to scale. This result is consistent with current literature findings that render support to an inverse relationship between farm size and productivity in developing countries.
