Livestock production efficiency, technological heterogeneity, and total factor productivity dynamics in the world's top 50 livestock-producing countries

Livestock production plays a critical role in global food security and economic development, yet significant disparities in productivity and efficiency persist across regions. This study provides a comprehensive assessment of global livestock productivity by simultaneously evaluating technical efficiency, technological heterogeneity, and productivity dynamics across 50 major livestock-producing economies, an integrated approach that addresses a critical gap in the existing literature, where these dimensions have largely been examined in isolation. The study employs an integrated analytical framework that combines: (i) a Slacks-Based Measure DEA model to estimate group-specific and meta-frontier efficiency scores; (ii) meta-frontier analysis to compute technology gap ratios (TGRs) across income groups; and (iii) the Malmquist-Luenberger Productivity Index to decompose total factor productivity change into efficiency change and technical change components. The findings show significant differences in efficiency. High-Income countries exhibit near-frontier performance, with meta-frontier efficiency of 0.8163 and technology gap ratio of 0.9355, indicating strong technological alignment with global best practices, followed by Lower-Middle Income (0.7278, TGR 0.7569) and Upper-Middle Income (0.6612, TGR 0.8006), while the Low-Income countries achieved 0.8508 LSPE-MF and 0.8508 TGR. 19 countries, including Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Myanmar, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Pakistan, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Tanzania, the United States, and Viet Nam are at the global efficiency frontier. Global TFP increased by an average of 2.0% annually, largely due to improvements in technical efficiency (2.1%), while technological progress contributed only marginally (−0.1%). The capacity for productivity growth is highest in Lower-Middle Income countries, with both efficiency improvement and technological progress contributing to productivity growth on average of 2.8% per year, while Low-Income countries experience productivity decline (MLI = 0.922) through severe efficiency decline. The Kruskal-Wallis test also shows that the differences in LSPE-MF, TGR and MLI are statistically significant for p = 0.000, p = 0.000 and p = 0.001, respectively. The results suggest that most of the gains in global livestock productivity in the 24-year study period have been realized across existing livestock frontiers, rather than by innovations in the frontier. Policies must focus on the transfer of technologies to the less developed regions and greater investments in livestock research and development to speed convergence to the global production frontier. © 2026 The Authors.