With continuous growth of students' enrolments in the public universities and limited funding, assessing the efficiency of universities is vital for effective allocation and utilisation of educational resources. Are higher education institutions in South Africa making the most efficient use of resources made available to them? This study attempts to provide an answer to this question. We apply a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method to estimate technical efficiency (TE) of 22 public universities in South Africa for the period 2009 to 2013. A university is said to be efficient if it is producing maximum output (number of graduates and publications) from a minimum quantity of inputs (staff numbers, students' enrolments, and expenditure). The results indicate that over the study period the average TE of universities declined from 0.83 to 0.78. Research-intensive universities were more efficient than professional-oriented universities. These results can help key decision-makers such as the Commission on Higher Education and universities management in identifying possibilities for improving institutional performance by identifying their strengths and weaknesses and benchmarking with their peers.

PurposeThe authors examine the factors influencing membership in farmer organizations (FO) and their effects on the decision to adopt farm technologies by rice farmers in Ghana.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses a farm survey of 900 households from Northern Ghana and a recursive bivariate probit (RBP) model that accounts for selection bias and endogeneity.FindingsThe results indicate that the household head’s decision to adopt machinery and row planting increases by 38.4 and 25.3%, respectively, upon joining a farmer organization. Membership in farmer organization is positively influenced by off-farm income, asset value, farmer organization location and farmer location in Upper West region but negatively by males, age and total livestock units owned. Machinery adoption is positively influenced by membership in farmer organizations and respondent being male but negatively influenced by the years of schooling, farm size, farm distance and location of a farmer in Ghana's Upper East and West regions. Similarly, row planting adoption is positively influenced by membership in farmers' organization but adversely by farm size, farm distance and a farmer's location in Upper East region of Ghana.Research limitations/implicationsIt can be concluded that membership in farmers' organizations significantly impacts farm household head’s decision to adopt machinery and row planting in rice production, which potentially enhance crop productivity.Practical implicationsThese results show the importance of agricultural stakeholders in encouraging the formation and strengthening of farmer organizations to support the adoption of modern farming technologies.Originality/valueDeveloping literature has demonstrated that farmer organizations promote the adoption of agricultural innovations. However, most of these studies have concentrated on conventional agricultural innovations and have used methods that fail to account for potential selection bias. This paper fills this important gap.

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