CHARACTERIZATION AND TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY OF PORTUGUESE WINE FARMS

This study aims to characterize and to analyse the evolution of wine production. to measure the levels of technical efficiency. and to relate these with farmers and farms attributes. The attributes considered were the physical and economic size, the producer age. the lamer legal status. type of land ownership. land irrigation, type of commercialization and productive specialization. The sample used is composed of I a panel if wine farms. producers of grapes for wine for the period 2000-2005. enrolled in the European Farm Accounting System, belonging to the Alentejo region of Portugal. The characterization and the evolution analysis cif the wine farms were done based on a set of technical and economic indicators. In order to measure the efficiency. the methodology utilized was the parametric one, making, use of a stochastic production frontier. The characteristics of the utilized distribution to compute the efficiency were tested, as well as the efficiency variability with time. The relationship between the efficiency and the farms and farmers attributes was tested making use of analyses of variance and Kruskall-Wallis tests. The results showed that there are room to improve the levels of technical efficiency in input use and that efficiency is variant with time. The increase on technical efficiency with economic size and with farm net income was observed. as well as with farm entrepreneurship.