Technology Gap Efficiency of Small-Scale Rice Processors in Anambra State, Nigeria

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper has some weaknesses that the authors must address to improve its quality and make it publishable.

Line 67: The authors should provide more sound arguments to motivate why they want to measure the technology gap. For instance, they could first present the Value Chain Development Programme (VCDP) and Agricultural Transformation Agenda Support training projects; secondly, they could emphasize the regional differences relative to availability of resources, and eventually differences relative to climate conditions. It can be assumed that such differences affect the production function of farmers. Hence, measuring the efficiency of the production process requires that the differences are taken into account. These are just some suggestions to better motivate the need to adopt a meta-frontier based approach. To this aim, the authors can use what they say in section 1.2.

Lines 81-84: the authors use two concepts that they did not use in the previous part of their paper (technical efficiency and TGR). My suggestion is to provide arguments that emphasize the knowledge gap and justify the research questions without using too much technicism here. Simply using efficiency rather than technical efficiency and technology gap rather than TGR is enough. These concepts will be usefully introduced in the methodology section of the paper.

Section 1.2: it is overly long.

Literature review: the authors should conduct a more in-depth literature review. There is a large amount of international research on the efficiency measurement of the rice production. Hence, the authors should consider a greater number of international papers.

Line 132: here the authors write as follows “…To understand the impact of government intervention in the rice processing sector…”. Therefore, I understand that one of the research questions is to investigate to what extent the government effort (I suppose training) affects the efficiency of rice production process, as the government action generates a gap of technology. Unfortunately, “To understand the impact of government intervention in the rice processing sector” is not included in the research question list (lines 146 – 147). The main research question is “To understand the impact of government intervention in the rice processing sector” and measuring the technology gap is only a means to provide an answer to the previous research question.

Section 3 “Materials and methods”: the selection of variables is an important step of the SFA methodology implementation. The selection of variables should be supported by an in-depth literature review (see variables at lines 597-603 and list in Table 2). Why has SFA model been specified using these variables? Moreover, these variables should be presented with greater detail. My suggestion is to include a dedicated sub-section.

Sample is relatively small (100 units) taking into the large number of variables. Is this acceptable?

Do authors perform confirmative analysis? If this is the case, then hypotheses to be tested should be formally developed from literature and reasoning.

A more in depth and sound discussion of results is necessary.

The authors should discuss policy implications of findings in the last section 5 (which has been denominated Conclusions and Recommendations…). Limitations of the study should also be presented. 

Author Response

I believe all the review correction has been handled. your review was in-depth and am grateful for the quality work to improve the paper 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript overall interesting and informative for reader. Authors compiled a comphrensive information for the readers. before acceptance I ahave some minor correction

author prepared citation format as per journal policy,

Line 65: What is GHGs?

Line 81:technology gap ratios (TGRs) use full form at first use, and alo recheck whole manuscript,  you already use technology gap ratio term many time above,, so use short form at first use..

some reference are missing in the reference list

many typos in the citation format

line 83 and 193: technical efficiency (TE): use abbervation at first use

line 95: United State Department of Agriculture (USDA:  use abbervation at first use

some values after dot is two and some value after dot is three, make similar decimal value after dot e.g. 0.23 and 0.36 so on,,,

line 360: technological gap ratio (TGR) use abbervation at first use

line 386 to 396: check this paragraph,, many percentage decimal vlaues are not same..

line 399: many time use this term above, but abbervated is here, " stochastic frontier model (SFM)"

recheck the whole manuscript,, many typo in explaining the short and full.

overall manuscript interesting and good in writting

Author Response

I have effectively addressed all concerned. thanks for the quality review process

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have addressed my concerns. However, they have to check English style and references. All references in the list should be cited in the paper text (see, for instance Mohammed)

Author Response

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf