Choice of Techniques: A Case Study of the Cottonseed Oil-extraction Industry in Pakistan

This paper analyses the choice of techniques at the product level with a view to evaluating the claim made by Stewart [17] and others that “choice of technique is eliminated once choice of product is made”. We consider the extraction of edible oil from cottonseed as a case study. Use is made of engineering data, coupled with product and factor price data from Pakistan, to examine the possibilities of factor substitution at the micro level for a reasonably well-defined product. The product in this case is well defined, although there are some qualitative differences associated with different methods of extraction.