Technical and Scale Efficiency in Nursery Enterprises in an Area of Significant Widespread Horticulture in Italy

The aim of this work is to identify the factors that influence the level of efficiency in horticultural nurseries and to estimate their impact on productivity as well as the direction and intensity with which they act. The investigation was focused on table tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum L.), a species widely cultivated in horticultural greenhouses and in the open field, for which the recourse to transplantation represents a normal operation to the point that nurseries activate a large number of productive cycles for this species throughout the year with the aim of obtaining ‘‘ungrafted seedlings’’ or ready-to-use ‘‘grafted seedlings’’. This study used the methodological approach of data envelopment analysis (DEA) and Tobit regression and was able to identify which of the factors linked to management choices, professionalism, and the motivation of entrepreneurs have a notable influence on the level of efficiency reached by nurseries and which of these factors offer possibilities for increasing their levels of production. The results of this investigation reveal that in the nurseries, the possibilities for achieving increasing economies of scale are limited by the structural relationships between capital and land and between land and labor, by the production strategies in place, and by the degree of utilization of materials and labor.