Productive efficiency

[2] An equilibrium may be productively efficient without being allocatively efficient — i.e. it may result in a distribution of goods where social welfare is not maximized (bearing in mind that social welfare is a nebulous objective function subject to political controversy).

Productive efficiency is an aspect of economic efficiency that focuses on how to maximize output of a chosen product portfolio, without concern for whether your product portfolio is making goods in the right proportion; in misguided application, it will aid in manufacturing the wrong basket of outputs faster and cheaper than ever before.

Due to the nature and culture of monopolistic companies, they may not be productively efficient because of X-inefficiency, whereby companies operating in a monopoly have less of an incentive to maximize output due to lack of competition.

Many theoretical measures of production efficiency have been proposed in the literature as well as many approaches to estimate them.

[7] See the recent book by Sickles and Zelenyuk (2019) for comprehensive coverage of the theory[which?]

An example PPF: points B, C and D are all productively efficient, but an economy at A would not be, because D involves more production of both goods. Point X cannot be achieved.
Productive efficiency occurs under competitive equilibrium at the minimum of average total cost for each good, such as the one shown here.