Agricultural Economics最新文献

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.

Improved agricultural inputs—including seeds, fertilizer, and pest control products—are necessary for raising farm productivity in Africa. Yet, in many locations, variable input quality and a proliferation of unregistered brands make product selection and calibration of optimal dosages difficult for farmers. Unregistered pesticides pose two specific quality problems: frequent underdosage and, in some cases, inclusion of banned substances. In response to widespread farmer complaints, this study estimates the prevalence of unregistered pesticide products by conducting a detailed survey of agricultural input retailers in 10 major agricultural markets across Mali. The article explores resulting risks and responses by private and public sector stakeholders through structured interviews with key informants in those same markets. The findings suggest widespread sales of low-cost, unregistered pesticides. In the 10 markets surveyed, unregistered products accounted for 26% of total pesticide volumes sold, posing risks to farmers, traders, and the environment. In response, farmer support groups and pesticide trade associations have begun to fight back through education and awareness campaigns, agro-input dealer training, farmer outreach, and in some cases, joint bulk procurement. To reinforce these initiatives, the survey results suggest two low-cost indicators for spatially targeting regulatory enforcement efforts.

Food systems have significant externalities that are not reflected in market prices. A first step to correct parts of these externalities is to make them transparent through “true-” or full-cost accounting. Estimates of the external health and environmental costs of food systems at a global level suggest that they may be about two times larger than food valued at market prices, that is, about 20 trillion US$ of externalities versus 9 trillion US$ of food value in the markets. The agricultural economics profession is challenged to move the true cost research agenda forward by identifying realistic pathways for internalizing some of the large food system externalities. Moving from true cost accounting (TCA) to policy action needs to involve citizens and policy-making bodies because internalizing externalities requires buy-in. This relates for instance, to policy instruments such as product labeling, nudging, and differential taxes and subsidies to incentivize healthy diets and disincentivize food waste. Agricultural economics will need to accompany the implementation of any true cost approaches with scrutiny in terms of the efficiency, welfare, ecological, and distributional effects of such policies.

Occupational sex segregation is a key driver of the gender gap in earnings. Using data from 11,691 aspiring agribusiness entrepreneurs in Nigeria, this article explores factors that drive sectoral choice, gender differences in the choice decision, and especially the role played by norms around gender roles. When given a choice of 11 agricultural value chains in a government program, we find the majority (54 percent) of the applicants chose to enter into the poultry value chain, and women were more likely to choose poultry than men. This article finds evidence of more restrictive gender norms in Northern Nigeria states, which lowers women's likelihood of entering into agricultural value chains where the potential for profit may be higher. The gender bias in sectoral choice is also attributed to differences in work experience especially in agricultural activities and in the chosen value chain, as well as in land ownership. Women with more experience in male-dominated agricultural value chains exhibit lower self-efficacy, which could reflect the challenges they face when deviating from social norms to operate within nontraditional value chains.

Using panel data on a statistically representative sample of Iowa farmland parcels from 1997 to 2017, we analyze the factors determining whether land is farmed by the owner or rented out under a cash rent or crop share contract. The landowner's decision to rent or operate the land depends on the distribution of expected net returns to the land, and so estimates of the factors affecting rental terms will be biased if the sample only includes rental contracts and excludes the owner-operator. Land with higher mean and/or lower variance of expected net returns is most likely to be rented out. Participants in the rental market will include the most risk-averse landowners and the least risk-averse tenants, while the least risk-averse landowners operate their own land. Our empirical results suggest that the rising use of cash rent contracts and declining incidence of owner-operation and crop-share rental contracts is consistent with falling coefficient of variation in expected net returns per acre.

Modern cooling technologies that utilize renewable energy sources have been increasingly recognized as promising tools to address various challenges emerging in progressively complex agrifood systems in developing countries. Knowledge gaps about the actual impacts of these technologies in developing countries remain, especially in Africa south of the Sahara (SSA). This study fills this knowledge gap by providing evidence from the evaluation of recent interventions in northeast Nigeria in which seven small solar-powered cold storages were installed across seven horticulture markets. Combinations of difference-in-difference (DID) and variants of propensity-score-based methods suggest that cold storage significantly increased horticulture sales volumes and revenues of market agents. Back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that increased net revenues for market agents may be sufficiently large to recoup cold storage investments and operating costs within a reasonable time frame. Using cold storage also reduced the share of food loss. It lengthened the products' shelf-life while raising prices received by market agents and farmers, which were associated with improved product quality, expanded value-adding activities by market agents, and increased use of advance payments.

Dealing with weather extremes is a major challenge for farmers and often comes at high costs for public budgets. Therefore, we investigate the influence of specific simplified decision rules, so-called heuristics, on farmers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for protecting themselves against low-probability and high-consequence weather shocks. To this end, we conducted a framed field experiment with 237 farmers in Germany, using incentivized lottery-based multiple price lists. We explored the effects of different heuristics within the prospect theory framework. Our results indicate that, on average, farmers exhibit risk-loving behavior towards monetary losses, leading to a low WTP for risk mitigation. The results also suggest that the imitation heuristic, shock experience heuristics, and the threshold of concern heuristic influence farmers’ WTP. Farmers specifically imitate successful farmers when these are risk-loving. The lack of personal experience with low-probability events induces farmers to assign less weight to low-probability shocks, which lowers their WTP. Farmers also systematically assign less weight to low-probability shocks that they consider “too rare to be concerned about.” Accounting for the use of these heuristics can help design improved risk management instruments and policies.

We investigate the spillover effects in farmers’ adoption decisions of a novel pesticide-free wheat production system. To this end, we exploit the variability and asymmetry in the social ties among neighboring farmers. We find evidence of spillover effects in farmers’ adoption decisions as well as in farm and farmer characteristics. Our results further highlight the importance of accounting for potentially heterogeneous social ties in farmer networks beyond pure measures of spatial proximity: spillover effects are only robust once we account for the strength of social ties through farmers’ stated tendency to consult peers on agricultural decisions. Our findings highlight the relevance of peer influence in the diffusion of sustainable agriculture practices even in contexts of well-functioned institutions and high interest in environmental protection such as European agriculture. We discuss implications for the design of policies and programs for sustainable agriculture, which are currently in the center of attention in agricultural policymaking.