| Abstract | Alleviation of  poverty is a central issue in Nepal. Given the limited stock of land, and the infant/unorganised manufacturing sector, increased demand for food has to be satisfied by improving production efficiency. This paper  examines how this could be achieved. An SDF model and DEA model  identify the existence of a high degree of technical inefficiency in Nepalese  agricultural production system, suggesting that there is a substantial  prospect of increasing agricultural productivity using the existing level of  inputs and resources more efficiently. Among the three farm sizes in the  data set, medium size farmers achieve a higher technical efficiency than  large and small farm sizes, suggesting that productive efficiency can be  increased with the encouragement of creating medium size holdings. The  observed decreasing returns to scale also implies that productivity gains  could be achieved by breaking up of large farms into small family farms. The  technical inefficiency model suggests the potential for shifting production  frontier upwards by providing ownership of land, increasing farmers?  education, and knowledge and increasing land quality including irrigation facilities.
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