Abstract
The aquaculture management considers the maintenance of households lifehood more than profit maximization. As aquaculture industry has developed enterprise farms appeared, and the small and the large scale farms coexist. The features of coexistence could be summarized as followings. First of all, the large scale farms show the higher net profit while the small scale farms show the higher profit per 1ha and the earning rate. Secondly, in the case of over 2ha, the earning rate is stable in spite of the scale expansion. Moreover, in processing method, dried seaweed occupy the biggest proportion in the small scale farms while the raw seaweed occupy the biggest proportion in the large scale farms. Lastly, the scale of farms becomes larger, the participation rate of household labor rises. This thesis analyses the efficiency of Korean seaweed farms in the way of DEA model and suggests the improvements for the efficiency management. The mean technical, pure technical and scale efficiencies were measured to be 0.88, 0.96 and 0.91, respectively. Among the 20 farms included in the analysis, 10 were technically efficient and 12 were scale efficient. In conclusion, it is shown that the aquaculture farms has been becoming the form of coexistence. This appearance results in the effort for reducing the cost in the small scale farms and in profit maximization in the large scale farms. On the other hand, middle scale farms is inefficient compared with the small or large scale farms. Therefore, in order to achieve the efficiency, it is necessary to accomplish economy of scale by extending farm size or to cut expenses by reducing farm area. In other word, the efforts for achieving the efficiency is required in a different direction in spite of the same scale.
