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A research and development project disseminated ecological technologies to approximately 3,250 vegetable farmers through farmer field schools (FFS) in four districts of Bali and East Java provinces of Indonesia. This article aims to assess the economic sustainability of vegetable production after FFS participation.

A survey randomly sampled 500 farmers, comprised of FFS participants (50%) and non-FFS participants (50%). Based on 1,000 farm operations, this analysis employed input-saving technology as the fundamental model examined using the double-difference method. Simultaneous reduction of agrochemicals and improvement of productivity represent indicators of economic sustainability.

Results indicate that pesticide use decreased without jeopardising farm productivity; moreover, vegetable production increased. These findings indicate that the ecological technologies transferred through FFS significantly improved economic sustainability performance.

This study purposively selected farmers who grew tomato and chilli. Thus, the outcomes are not generalisable to other crops.

FFS continues to be an effective method for transferring agricultural technologies to farmer communities. Policymakers are recommended to use FFS for disseminating beneficial and sustainable technologies to broader agricultural communities.

The adoption of ecological technologies provides positive economic and ecological milieus.

This study employs a double-differences approach to verify input-saving technological progress. Therefore, the performance of economic sustainability attributable to the project intervention is theoretically justified.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of technology progress on carbon intensity in China. Abatement of carbon emission has become one of the most important targets for the Chinese government. Numerous studies confirm that technology progress is the main factor responsible for reduction in CI. However, very few studies analyze the impacts of technology progress on CI for various regions. There is also inadequate knowledge on the transmission mechanisms of the impacts. These are the motivations for this research.

Given energy consumption and CO₂ emissions, an improved MLPI, which stands for the generalized technology progress related to energy and environment, is introduced and decomposed into technical and efficiency changes. Using a panel data of 30 provinces from 1997 to 2012, the authors construct different panel data models to investigate the effects of technology progress (and its decomposition elements) on CI.

Results show that technology progress is conducive for reducing CI, with the main factor being technical change. It also finds that the two components of technology progress have completely different effects in the three regions of China. Dynamic panel data models with threshold effects indicate that capital deepening enforces and weakens the negative effects of technical change and efficiency change on CI.

The above conclusions provide new evidences for policy-makers with respect to capital deepening, technical innovation and allocative efficiency enhancement with a view to achieving CI reduction.

Analyses the production function of the UK manufacturing industries by estimating a translog cost function for the period 1955‐1981. Aims to estimate technical change parametrically. Among the conclusions arising from this estimate are: that indications are that technological change is input biased in the food, drink and tobacco industries; and that these industries seem to have experienced deterioration in scale economies during the 1970s. Also finds that energy and capital inputs are complementary. This supports the argument that reductions in energy price will be accompanied by higher levels of investment.

Kuwait's banking system has experienced considerable difficulties in the past two decades due to financial and political shocks. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, government financial support re‐established confidence in the financial system, allowing banks to restore their balance sheets and increase profitability starting in the mid 1990s. This paper examines the performance of banks in Kuwait during the period of financial renaissance, 1994–1997. We provide an empirical assessment of the efficiency, productivity, and technological progress of banks on the basis of the Data Evelopment Analysis and the Malmquist Index. The empirical results suggest that Kuwaiti banks fail to optimally utilize a significant proportion of their resources. The sources of bank inefficiency appear to be both allocative (regulatory) and technical (managerial) in nature. The results also indicate that smaller banks in Kuwait are more efficient than larger ones, although all banks have improved their efficiency‐levels and experienced some gains in productivity.

The purpose of this paper is to incorporate risk in technical efficiency of ASEAN banks in a panel data framework for the period 2000 to 2015.

The directional distance function and semi-parametric framework are employed to estimate efficiency scores for two scenarios, one with only good outputs and the other with a combination of good and bad outputs.

The findings show there is no evidence of technological progress for banks in ASEAN and concerns about the outperformance of Vietnam’s banks. In addition, performance of Vietnam’s banks tends to be distorted by low level of loan loss reserves.

To reflect the true performance and shorten the period of removing bad assets, the State Bank of Vietnam can request banks in Vietnam to book more loan loss reserves.

By examining such a new approach, this study makes an early attempt to incorporate credit risk into the banking efficiency in ASEAN region.

This paper provides an empirical test of the available evidence concerning firms’ productivity structure and the Schumpeterian hypothesis using the Japanese trunk route airlines during the period 1977‐1993. Empirical tests of this hypothesis have traditionally examined the relationship between some measure of innovative activity and firm size. Former studies have employed the growth rate of productivity as a measure of innovative activity in empirical tests. However, the innovative activity should be measured as the rate of technical change using some innovative inputs and outputs. Since the total factor productivity (TFP) can be decomposed into the technical change and the scale economies terms, this study demonstrates the shift in the cost function associated with technical change, and the change of economies of scale. In this study, the technical change and the scale economies are directly measured by using trans‐log type function. Lastly, the Schumpeterian hypothesis is tested by the technical change. From the empirical results, the Schumpeterian hypothesis is rejected.

Universities are expected to operate with high efficiency, with ever-growing expectations from a rising number of stakeholders in society. From a theoretical perspective economic science does provide frameworks and methods in order to tackle this, with the cornerstone of defining efficiency as a simple relation of a quantity of inputs toward a quantity of outputs. For the practice of university management and policy this does not answer the crucial questions of which inputs and which outputs to measure, and how to ensure the quality aspect of such management approaches. Higher education research can contribute to answering these questions. This chapter outlines a sector-specific framework for efficiency analysis and management, including suggestions regarding how to implement efficiency-improving measures in university settings.