Agricultural Economics最新文献

This article presents evidence of misallocation across households in rural Indian agriculture. I show that household demographics predict own farm labor demand for smallholder farmers but not non-smallholder farmers. A simple model of labor allocation predicts a clear consequence of this duality: smallholder farmers will reallocate labor across plots less in response to price changes than non-smallholders. Detailed household panel data confirms this theoretical prediction. Three additional facts suggest that a lack of off-farm labor opportunities may be partly responsible for the behavior of smallholders, leading smallholders to over allocate labor to agricultural production. First, smallholders report fewer hours of involuntary unemployment when their own crop prices increase. Second, yield is substantially higher for smallholders on plots of the same size. Finally, estimated marginal revenue products of labor are consistently lower for smallholders.

We revisit the question of whether the poor pay more for food using household food expenditure data from Tanzania. We control for spatial factors that could affect food prices, namely, whether a rural household is in a peri-urban, intermediate, or hinterland rural zone (distinguished by distance to urban areas) and whether an urban household is in a primary city, secondary city, or a town. Our results differ from conventional wisdom. First, we find that the rich and the poor pay about the same price per kilogram on average for certain key Tanzanian food products like rice, maize flour, and cooking oil. Second, we find that poor households do not buy meaningfully smaller quantities per transaction than do richer households. Third, the rich and the poor also make roughly the same number of purchases per month for most food products studied. Lastly, we find that bulk discounts (a decrease in price per kilogram with an increase in quantity purchased) do exist, but only up to a certain quantity (with exceptions in some animal proteins), below which few households purchase. Hence, our evidence suggests that poorer Tanzanian households do not pay significantly more for key food products.

Conservation agriculture techniques have the potential to increase agricultural production while decreasing CO₂ emissions, yet adoption in the developing world remains low—in part because many years of continuous adoption may be required to realize gains in production. We conduct a framed field experiment in northern Ghana to study how incentives and peer information may affect adoption. Incentives increase adoption, both while they are available and after withdrawal. There is no overall effect of peer information, but we do find evidence that information about long-term adoption increased adoption, particularly when that information shows that yield gains have been achieved.

We demonstrate the benefit of spatial smoothing for crop trend estimation with a deterministic spatio-temporal trend model. The proposed model is semiparametric, where the parametric temporal trend is modeled with a two-knot spline function for forecasting robustness, and the nonparametric spatially-varying coefficients are modeled by the radial basis function method for flexibility. To select the smoothing parameter of our trend model, we propose a forward validation criterion tailored to meet the forecasting nature of rating crop insurance. This criterion is based on a rolling regression approach that adds one year of data at a time for validation. We also propose a new criterion for model comparison using relative mean squared error in forecasting insurance payouts. Our empirical results show that the proposed trend model is more efficient and capable of identifying profitable insurance policies than two competing models in most state-crop combinations.

Malnutrition among women of reproductive age and children remains one of the major issues in developing countries, particularly zinc deficiency. Zinc deficiency hinders cognitive and physical development in children as well as adults. This study utilized a non-hypothetical laboratory valuation experiment to analyze whether positive information about biofortified rice affects consumers’ valuations of biofortified as well as non-biofortified rice. Specifically, we designed a within-subject experiment based on Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) auction mechanism to compare consumers’ valuations of zinc-biofortified and popular non-biofortified rice varieties before and after exposure to information about the health benefits of zinc-biofortified rice. We conducted our experiments in randomly selected four districts of Bangladesh, and a total of 134 consumers participated in our study. Results reveal that consumers assign a significant premium to zinc-biofortified rice when they receive information about zinc-biofortified rice and its health benefits. Intriguingly, positive information about zinc-biofortified rice negatively affects the valuation of non-biofortified rice varieties, suggesting negative spillover effects. Moreover, our results also identify that both the information provision and labeling are important to increase consumer demand for zinc-biofortified rice.

In this article, we explore whether and to what extent smallholder farmers in Northeastern Thailand and Central Vietnam adjust their farm-level management strategies in response to droughts. We hereby consider adjustments in flexible adaptive strategies including water management, fertilizer and pesticide application, labor, and machine use in response to a contemporaneous drought, and adjustments in crop diversification and investments in response to a previous year drought. To that end, we combine longitudinal household data from the two regions from 2007 to 2017 with monthly high-resolution rainfall and temperature data to characterize droughts at the subdistrict level. We find that Thai farmers scale down input costs in terms of fertilizer and hired labor and outsource tasks to service providers with equipment such as a combine, especially when exposed to extreme droughts. Their diversification and investment response seems, however, muted. While Vietnamese farmers are also reducing fertilizer use, they are expanding both the number of hired laborers and rented machinery services. They are also diversifying their cropping portfolio and investing in agricultural equipment.

This study evaluates spatial market and storage efficiency in Turkish lemon markets using switching regime (SR) and threshold autoregression models. Our sample period includes a crucial regulatory reform aimed at improving the performance of fresh fruit and vegetable markets, shortening the production-consumption chain, and reducing retail prices. Using an extended SR model that allows for a gradual transition from the old to the new marketing regime, we test the hypothesis of no structural change in market efficiency and transaction costs in regional markets, including major consumption regions Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir. Results indicate that the probability of efficient arbitrage regime is relatively higher in the post-reform period, albeit there is still room for improvement. Extended SR models show no significant change in average transaction costs, while threshold autoregression models suggest a slight increase. Furthermore, spatial prices adjust more quickly in the post-reform period, supporting relatively more efficient market functioning. While the regional markets seem to function more efficiently following the marketing reform, it has not led to permanent reductions in retail prices. Finally, our results from storage threshold autoregression models suggest that markets function reasonably efficiently, with no remarkable difference in storage behavior between the pre-reform and post-reform periods.

We identify factors influencing farmers’ decision-making on various production contracts and are explicitly concerned with whether managing market risk or profit orientation promotes contract farming (CF). After controlling for potential endogeneity, the IV-Tobit regression results indicate that farmers’ risk behavior and profit orientation are vital factors driving CF participation decisions. However, we observed that the impact of profit orientation is relatively more substantial than the risk management motive, suggesting that earning a higher profit, rather than managing market risks, is the primary objective of CF adoption. In addition, other factors such as farm size, mean contract price, education, age, and extension services play a significant role in CF participation. The major policy implications, based on results, call for enhancing the CF network and encouraging farmers to commercialize agriculture as it facilitates access to the market and higher profits. Further, agribusiness firms should share more market risks with farmers to invite risk-averse smallholders into the fold of commercial farming.

Measuring and understanding gender differences in property rights is key to informing policy decisions and guiding investments aimed at fostering gender equality. However, there are a myriad ways of assessing property rights. Firstly, we assess which indicators to use and why it matters, focusing on rural Myanmar. Myanmar provides an interesting setting, as a large part of the population customarily follows joint property rights in marriage and upon dissolution of marriage and inheritance. However, documented property rights are in the household head's name – usually a male household member. We find that capturing de facto transfer rights is essential, but understanding discrepancies between reported transfer rights and documented rights will be key to policymakers. Capturing agricultural decision-making should remain a priority for agricultural projects. Second, we perform household- and intra-household level analyses to explore why we find joint land rights in some, but not all, households; and why some household members have less land rights than others. A common property rights regime positively reinforces women's land rights, but incompletely so. Within households, a person's role in the household, age, and key life cycle events such as parenthood and marriage are key determinants of having land rights.