Just add milk: a productivity analysis of the revolutionary changes in nineteenth-century Danish dairying Articles uri icon

authors

  • LAMPE, MARKUS
  • SHARP, PAUL RICHARD

publication date

  • November 2015

start page

  • 1132

end page

  • 1153

issue

  • 4

volume

  • 68

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 0013-0117

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1468-0289

abstract

  • The late nineteenth-century Danish agricultural revolution saw the modernization and growth of the dairy industry. Denmark rapidly caught up with the leading economies, and Danish dairying led the world in terms of productivity. Uniquely in a world perspective, high quality micro-level data exist documenting this episode. These allow the use of the tool of modern agricultural economists, stochastic frontier analysis, to estimate production functions for milk and thus find the determinants of these productivity and efficiency advances. This article identifies the contribution of modernization through specific new technologies and practices.

keywords

  • technical efficiency; panel data; farms; growth; denmark; model