Agricultural Economics最新文献

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.

Farmers grapple with uncertainties related to the adoption of improved agricultural practices. Adoption decisions on these practices may vary in response to risk in which farmers may be able to predict the chances of occurrence on outcomes of their decisions, and/or ambiguity where adoption-decision outcome probabilities are unknown. Also, these uncertainties may emanate from imperfect information on production returns from adoption and adoption-related fixed costs. In this paper, we study whether risk and ambiguity aversion create incentives or disincentives for intensity and duration of adoption of improved agricultural practices. For this, we combine experimental with survey data. We find that ambiguity aversion reduces incentives for high-intensity adoption while risk aversion attenuates this disincentive. As expected, risk aversion increases incentives for longer adoption of improved agricultural practices. Experience was expected to allow farmers to learn enough about payoff probabilities from adoption and render ambiguity aversion less important. Yet, we find it reduces the duration of adoption of soil and water conservation structures, which could be explained by adoption-related high fixed costs. On the other hand, ambiguity aversion appears to matter little with adoption of agroforestry despite the associated high fixed and management costs attributed to integrated agri-silviculture and agro-silvopastoral systems. Given the complementary nature of the practices, agricultural policy should be directed at interventions that attenuate the deterrent effect of ambiguity aversion through providing information related to production returns from the adoption of improved practices that involve high fixed (management) costs.

A long history of empirical research has focused on testing whether and when household consumption and production decisions are separable. If markets were perfect, household consumption would be independent of production. In this article, we propose that market channel choice complicates this relationship. Our analysis of household panel data from rural India, focusing on dairy, leads us to four key conclusions. First, milk consumption is correlated with production, and markets are not a complete substitute for household production. Second, a large presence of formal milk buyers in a village is associated with lower milk consumption in dairy households, overturning the positive association of participation in formal value chains with household milk consumption. Third, contrary to expectations, for households that do not own dairy animals and net buyers, the presence of formal value chains remains uncorrelated with milk consumption. Fourth, we infer, test for and find suggestive evidence of segmented milk markets, that is, different types of households participate in different markets for milk that do not seem to interact with each other. Policymakers focused on market development or production-based strategies need to factor in the possibility of market segmentation based on market channels while designing interventions.

The Vietnamese government is concerned with long-term food security due to the rising demand for food and potential climate-induced conversion of areas under food production. This article is among the first studies which examine the climate-induced uptake of crop substitution and its likely impact on the national target of maintaining food areas to sustain food security. In contrast to most crop choice analyses which obtain cross-household evidence using a Multinomial Logit model, we model within household competition across alternative uses of land using a Fractional Multinomial Logit model. Our empirical findings suggest that Vietnamese farmers have adapted to the changing climate by selecting different crops. Increases in winter and summer temperatures mean that farmers are more likely to substitute cereals for others. Farmers choose annual industrial crops in locations with warmer springs and autumns. The choice of perennial industrial crops is sensitive to spring and autumn temperatures. Precipitation has small impacts on land use choice. The projected climate changes are not likely to jeopardize the national target of maintaining 40 percent of farmland under food production. However, we expect projected climate changes to result in large shifts from cereals to annual industrial crops in the main rice bowl of Vietnam.

Aspirations influence future-oriented behavior and ensuing outcomes but they may also fail to do so when the aspired-to-status is far away from the current one. Theoretical predictions suggest an inverted U-shaped relationship between this aspiration gap and the effort to achieve what is aspired to. Aspirations that are ahead but not too far ahead of the current status serve as the best incentives for investments. We examine the income aspiration gap of smallholder households and relate it to livestock in a pastoral setting in Northern Kenya. Our focus on livestock is guided by the burgeoning recognition of livestock as an investment and saving conduit for many households in pastoral communities in developing nations. Employing different empirical strategies including parametric and semi-parametric techniques, we find livestock to be increasing with aspirations up to a threshold, from which it then declines to lead to an aspiration failure. Delving into livestock heterogeneity, we uncover evidence that cattle and poultry respond more to the aspiration gap than small ruminants such as sheep and goats. Different U-shaped tests confirm this relationship, bolstering the evidence of an aspiration failure. These findings are robust to the inclusion of relevant controls, truncations at zero, and different variable transformations. We also show that the findings are unlikely to be driven by unobserved heterogeneity. Additionally, we find that internal locus of control, that is the degree to which individuals believe they control outcomes in their lives is associated with livestock investments.

This article examines the relationship between agents’ behavioral attributes (or time preferences) and the problem of obesity and, more generally, problems of both overnutrition and undernutrition. Through a primary survey in western Delhi data were gathered on participants’ food choices and body mass index. Time preferences, as posited by the ($��\beta �,�\delta �$) quasi-hyperbolic discounting model, were elicited using an incentivized, choice-based experiment. Estimating a simultaneous two-equation model, the article finds that individuals in the sample with lower β and/or lower δ (or higher time preferences) make unhealthy food choices, which, in turn, significantly increases their BMI. In addition, a supplementary empirical exercise analyzes a large, secondary unit record data set, with savings as a proxy for time preferences, to provide evidence that these behavioral attributes also explain the problem of underweight (germane in developing countries).

Using rich data on graduate tenure-track faculty, we explore the gender pay gap in academic departments of economics and agricultural/applied economics and the differences between them. We find that the gender pay gaps in economics and agricultural/applied economics are 8.3% and 4.1%, respectively, controlling for faculty rank, experience, and university affiliation. The gender pay gap increases with rank and varies across institutions. Productivity is an important determinant of wages but it explains little of the gender pay gap. While the lower unexplained gap in agricultural/applied economics is laudable, a greater share of women who are assistant and associate professors is part of the explanation. Given institutional differences, we explore the extent to which institutional factors—differences in the returns to observed characteristics, such as rank; unobserved characteristics; and institutional differences in pay levels—contribute to the gender pay gap.

Measurement error in agricultural field area and productivity data for developing countries is widely acknowledged, but there is a shortage of evidence on what this implies, especially for farmers. By comparing self-reported to global positioning system measurements, we investigate area measurement errors using a nationally representative dataset of Zambian smallholder maize plots. We examine the implications for researchers’ understanding of productivity, but also how actual productivity may be affected. We find land area tends to be overstated on smaller fields and understated on larger fields. Correcting measurement error strengthens evidence of an inverse relationship between field size and productivity. Input use patterns indicate farmers believe the inaccurately reported area figures, suggesting measurement errors affect input choices and thus actual productivity. Improving farmer understanding of area measurements could improve productivity. Improving the accuracy of area data will improve researchers’ understanding of productivity.

This paper examines the impact of a change in the policy regime from flat rate to free farm electricity pricing, introduced in Punjab, India in February 1997 using a difference-in-differences framework. Based on village-level data from the second and the third rounds of the Minor Irrigation Census, the study finds a differential increase in the number of electric-operated tubewells and horsepower load of pumps in Punjab as compared to an agriculturally-similar and neighboring state, Haryana, which is taken as the control group. Through these channels, the study finds that the average groundwater depth increased by 1.9 meters more in Punjab as compared to Haryana, which is 22 percent of the baseline average groundwater depth in Punjab. Nationally-representative well-level data on groundwater depths from the Central Ground Water Board shows impact heterogeneity with sharper effect on groundwater depth for wells that are lying closer to the cut-off of about 10 meters where a technological shift from centrifugal to submersible pumps is required to maintain access to groundwater pumping.

Extreme weather events have occurred more frequently because of global climate change. For farmers, diversification, including crop and income diversification, is one of the most effective strategies to improve rural livelihoods by managing risk and coping with weather shocks. We investigate the empirical linkages among weather shocks, livelihood diversification, and household food security, exploiting three waves of nationally representative rural household panel data merged with granular weather data in Bangladesh. Using instrumental variable methods to control for the possible endogeneity of livelihood diversification decisions, we find that weather shocks are significant drivers of crop and income diversification. Moreover, both crop and income diversification are found to impact per capita food expenditure, while their effects on household dietary diversity are not robust. In particular, the distributional effects of income diversification are uniformly positive and significant for all quantiles of a per capita food expenditure distribution but are more sizable for the richest households. The findings, therefore, highlight the unequal effect of livelihood diversification within the context of rural South Asia, suggesting the need for diversification interventions targeting rural low-income groups with the goal of improving socioeconomic status, institutional conditions, and infrastructure.