Conceptual Connections and Measurement of Efficiency and Productivity - Agricultural Applications

Pupos, Tibor – Bacsi, Zsuzsanna – Poór, Judit – Szálteleki, Péter

Keywords: competitiveness, efficiency, profitability, Q19, R17, R18

One of the main tasks and responsibilities of the science of economics is to reveal the conditions and framework for scarce resource management. In other words, economics should give a scientific answer to three basic questions. Namely: what, how, and to whom to produce. The scientific answer to these questions cannot be given without the proper understanding of the concepts of competitiveness, efficiency, productivity, etc., and the methods of quantification and assessment. The concepts involved and the widely applied indicators have not been universally accepted and understood in the same way. However, it is easy to see that the properly defined indicators may be powerful tools in answering the three basic questions. We are convinced that this is a major justification for developing an interpretation for the concepts and indicators, which is as generally accepted as possible. The paper intends to reveal the causal relationship between the related concepts, and interpret the meanings of these, together with indicators suitable for measuring them. Our unhidden aim is to make these tools suitable not only for efficiency analyses, but for company-level assessments of competitiveness.

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