No image available
· 2018
"This paper considers the relationship between farm size and productivity. It begins by discussing measurement issues and conceptual issues related to agricultural productivity, including the well-documented difficulty of measuring inputs and outputs in smallholder production systems. The paper then considers the relationship between farm size and productivity, documenting patterns both across countries and within countries. Across countries, there is a weak but positive relationship between farm size and the value of agricultural output per unit of land (i.e. yield). A much stronger positive relationship holds for agricultural output per unit of labour, which is closely correlated with farm size across countries. Within countries, the relationship between farm size and yield is often negative (the widely documented 'inverse farm size-productivity relationship'). However, even within countries, there is typically a strong positive relationship between farm size and labour productivity. The paper concludes by considering the policy implications, if any, of the relationships between farm size and agricultural productivity"--Page 4.
We develop a spatial dynamic general equilibrium model of a small open agricultural economy to study the impact of global food, fuel and fertilizer price shocks on consumption patterns of heterogeneous households located in different regions, under alternative fiscal responses, including direct price subsidies and household transfers. We show strong spatial heterogeneity in response to shocks, with associated implications for welfare. In particular, while urban households' consumption baskets are more exposed to the direct effects of global food price shocks, remote rural households' production and consumption are more exposed to supply-side dislocations associated with shocks to fuel and fertilizer prices.
No image available
No image available
According to national accounts data, value added per worker is much higher in the non-agricultural sector than in agriculture in the typical country, and particularly so in developing countries. Taken at face value, this "agricultural productivity gap" suggests that labor is greatly misallocated across sectors. In this paper, we draw on new micro evidence to ask to what extent the gap is still present when better measures of sector labor inputs and value added are taken into consideration. We find that even after considering sector differences in hours worked and human capital per worker, as well as alternative measures of sector output constructed from household survey data, a puzzlingly large gap remains.
No image available
· 2017
According to national accounts data, value added per worker is much higher in the nonagricultural sector than in agriculture in the typical country, particularly in developing countries. Taken at face value, this "agricultural productivity gap'' suggests that labor is greatly misallocated across sectors. In this article, we draw on new micro evidence to ask to what extent the gap is still present when better measures of sector labor inputs and value added are taken into consideration. We find that even after considering sector differences in hours worked and human capital per worker, as well as alternative measures of sector output constructed from household survey data, a puzzlingly large gap remains.
No image available