ENVIRONMENTAL, QUALITY AND TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY IN OLIVE OIL INDUSTRY: A METAFRONTIER COMPARISON BETWEEN TURKEY AND SPAIN

The olive oil industry is one of the driving sectors of the agricultural economy of Mediterranean basin. Its production was trembling from 1 million tonnes in 1958/1959 to around 3.6 million tonnes in 2012/2013. The agricultural sector has an important role in Turkey, and also olive oil is one of the most important product of civilization and culture like Spain. Customers have expectations about environmental-friendly and safe products. They play a certain role as standards or reference points used by consumers to evaluate the performance of a company. The comparative olive oil efficiency analysis among Turkey and Spain was performed by applying the production frontier methods. Each frontier was estimated by Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), and also Metafrontier methodology was applied for the purpose of considering two different countries. Three outputs and five inputs were the main variables. The results show that olive oil firms had a high technical efficiency level. The countries are at a medium-high environmental and quality efficiency level.