Economic efficiency in plant operations with special reference to the marketing of California pears
Year: 1956
Type: article
Abstract: does not appear. First page follows. Foreword
For some years the California Agricultural Experiment Station and the United States
Department of Agriculture have been cooperating on a series of studies of marketing
cost and efficiency for deciduous fruits. These studies have had two major objectives:
(1) the development of appropriate and effective research approaches to problems of
plant operation and organization, making use of a combination of techniques from the
fields of economics, accounting, and engineering; and (2) the application of these
techniques to specific problems in the handling and marketing of deciduous fruits
in California.
The present publication is the first comprehensive technical research report on this
work. It is concerned with the development of the appropriate theoretical framework
for studies of plant costs and efficiency and with the research methods used in the
empirical approach to these theoretical relationships. It then applies these methods
to an analysis of the major functions or stages in fresh pear packing houses. Finally,
stage relationships are synthesized into descriptions of short- and long-run cost
functions under efficient operating conditions. Much of the material on stage relationships
has been published as a series of Giannini Foundation mimeograph reports and as popularized
research digests in California Agriculture. These functions were used to determine optimum combinations of plant technologies
and to synthesize plant cost and economies of scale functions in a thesis entitled
“Economic Efficiency in California Pear Packing Plants,” submitted by the senior author
to the Graduate Division, University of California, in 1953. This thesis also brought
together and developed the appropriate theoretical and empirical methodology. The
present publication is largely a revision and elaboration of the thesis study.
Source: Hilgardia
Authors: B. C. French, L. L. Sammet, R. G. Bressler
Language: English
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Zero hunger
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2328647679