Effect of public subsidies on farm technical efficiency: a meta-analysis of empirical results

Investigating the impact of public subsidies on farm technical efficiency is becoming a critical issue in applied agricultural policy analysis. This article presents a meta-analysis of empirical results on this issue, based on data gathered from a systematic literature review. We find that, in the empirical literature, subsidies are commonly negatively associated with farm technical efficiency. Meta-regression estimation results show that the direction (significantly negative, significantly positive or non-significant) of the observed effects is sensitive to the way subsidies are modelled in the empirical studies.