ABSTRACT
If you used ratio 1, you could claim that your productivity was high, in terms of yield per hectare. This is a perfectly valid measure of productivity, and is the kind of figure used to compare the output of one vineyard with another. However, if you picked your crop at the wrong time you can hardly profess to have made ‘the best use of resources’, so your efficiency cannot be said to be high. (Incidentally, your effectiveness would not be very good, either, as you will have failed in your aims.)
Often, ratios and other statistical information can be misleading, and it is important to think carefully about what the figures really mean. In the above case, the key difference was that ratio 1 was in terms of the number of bottles, not the wine’s value. In commercial organizations, it is sensible to assess overall productivity as a ratio of money: cost and value.
