Measuring Agricultural Production Performance and the Foundations for Provincial Efficiency Analysis in Vietnam: Evidence from Official Statistics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.70088/z4c8h454Keywords:
agricultural efficiency, data envelopment analysis, provincial panel data, farm structure, productivity, National Statistics OfficeAbstract
Improving agricultural efficiency is central to the country's transition from output expansion toward higher-value, resource-efficient and climate-resilient production. This study develops an empirical framework for measuring provincial agricultural production efficiency using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and panel econometrics, while reporting the complete descriptive evidence that can be verified from the currently assembled National Statistics Office (NSO) dataset. The verified dataset contains 63 provincial observations on farm structure for 2024 and a national series of agricultural and aquaculture output value per hectare for 2015–2024. In 2024, the 63 provinces and centrally governed cities recorded 26,111 farms in the assembled table. Livestock farms represented 54.60% of the total, cultivation farms 30.77%, aquaculture farms 11.41%, and other farms 3.22%. Regional concentration was pronounced: the Red River Delta recorded 6,893 farms and the Mekong River Delta 5,794, while the Northern Midlands and Mountain Areas recorded 2,444. National agricultural output value per hectare increased from VND 82.6 million in 2015 to VND 141.1 million in 2024, equivalent to a 70.82% cumulative increase and a compound annual growth rate of 6.13%. Aquaculture output value per hectare rose from VND 178.1 million to VND 285.2 million, a 60.13% increase and a CAGR of 5.37%. These verified patterns motivate a second-stage research design in which province-year data on agricultural output, land, labor, capital, farm structure, economic development and climate are combined to estimate constant- and variable-returns-to-scale DEA scores, scale efficiency, and two-way fixed-effects models. Because the currently verified workbook does not contain the complete province-year input-output panel, the paper deliberately does not report fabricated DEA coefficients, p-values or regression statistics. Instead, it provides a reproducible empirical specification, data architecture, diagnostic plan and submission-ready analytical narrative that can be finalized when the provincial panel is populated from NSO tables.References
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Copyright (c) 2026 Dai Hiep Nguyen, Benxi Lin (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
