Human Capital,Gender and Organisation in Transition Agriculture: Measuring and Explaining the Technical Efficiency of Bulgarian and Hungarian Farms

Based on survey data on Bulgarian and Hungarian crop and dairy farms, a double-peaked distribution of technical efficiency is observed. Several factors explain differences in efficiency. Human capital matters not only through age and education but also through gender, as farms with a higher proportion of women are more efficient. Contracting with upstream processors increases efficiency through facilitating the adoption of technology and access to credits. The superiority of family farms over corporate farms is confirmed for crops but not for dairy produce.     

Scope economies and technical efficiency of cocoa agroforesty systems in Ghana

A number of studies have addressed issues relating to the physiological, environmental and economic values of trees in cocoa farming systems. However, to date, little has been done to quantitatively examine the effect of crop diversity on cocoa farming efficiency. This study therefore sets out to first investigate whether and to what extent crop diversity (defined as the mixing of cocoa with other crop species on farmers' plots) affects productivity on cocoa farms. Secondly, it sought to establish whether there are economies of scope (i.e., cost complementarities) from the sharing of farm inputs by crops on the same plots. Our results indicate that diversified (i.e., multi-crop) cocoa farms are more efficient than single (i.e., mono) crop farms. Furthermore, our estimate for the economies of scope parameter indicates possibilities for cost complementarities between production of cocoa and other crops on the same plot. We advocate further investigation on the issue of scope economies to determine which crop combinations offer better cost complementarities and also meet biodiversity conservation objectives.     

Are Women Less Capable in Managing Crops? Insights from Cotton Production in Northern China

Women’s performance in agriculture matters, as women are becoming increasingly involved in agricultural production worldwide. Many studies have demonstrated that women-led farms perform less well as a result of less access to production factors, but no studies focus on how women perform without this constraint. This study fills that gap by analyzing the case of cotton cropping, which is known for its high labor requirements, high production inputs, and need for technical knowledge. Using primary data collected in northern China over the 2006–9 period, it uses the concept of “Daily Crop Management” (DCM) and identifies DCM farms managed by women whose husbands were engaged in off-farm activities on a long-term basis. The study finds that one-third of all farms were female-DCM farms, that these were smaller than those of their male counterparts but had equal access to production factors and achieved equal if not better technical and economic performances.     

CAPITAL REQUIREMENTS IN AGRICULTURE: AN INTERNATIONAL COMPARISON

Capital requirements may be expressed in various ways but when comparisons are to be made between situations of great variety it is best to express them per unit of annual product. The definition of product also raises difficulties. Here it is measured net of agricultural inputs but still gross of industrial inputs. The study approaches the problem by first considering the capital requirements of the simplest types of agriculture and then moving up the scale towards the more advanced. Simple forms of crop culture using hand tools may require only 0.1 to 0.2 of a year's product in the form of capital. These requirements increase when livestock are added, either for draught power or for their products. Increases also occur when tree and bush crops are introduced. In the less favourable climates, capital is also needed for the provision of shelter. When comparisons are possible between farms of different sizes, the greater capital requirements per unit of product for the smaller farms are clearly to be seen. In general the amount of capital per unit of product in agriculture is tending to fall, both through improvements in techniques and through an increase in the average size of holding.     

Women's Work Choices in Kenya: The Role of Social Institutions and Household Gender Attitudes

This study considers the factors that influence women's work behavior in Kenya. In particular, it examines whether gender attitudes and certain types of social institution influence the probability of employment or type of employment for women. Using data from the Demographic and Health Survey of 2008–9, it finds that religion and ethnicity are significant determinants of women's employment in Kenya. While personal experience of female genital mutilation is insignificant, spousal age and education differences, as well as marital status (which reflect attitudes both in women's natal and marital families), are significant determinants of women's employment choices.     

On the distribution of education and democracy

This paper examines the determinants of female autonomy within households in a developing country. In particular, we investigate the relative contributions of earned versus unearned income in enhancing women's autonomy and the role of employment outside of their husband's farm. In a simple theoretical model, it is demonstrated that earned income could be more important than unearned income in empowering women. Using data from rural Bangladesh, empirical estimations confirm this prediction and also reveal the surprising fact that it is not employment per se but employment outside their husbands' farms that contributes to women's autonomy. The data also point to the importance of choosing the correct threat point in theoretical analyses of female autonomy.     

Bundling agricultural technologies to adapt to climate change

Farmers can respond to climate change by modifying their technologies or management practices, or both. In this paper, we examine the choice of crop, irrigation, and cover as a bundled decision by a farmer. Using discrete choice analysis and a cross section of farms from Israel, we test whether these decisions are sensitive to climate and find that they are. In the case of Israel, the farmers completely substitute capital for climate. Simulating increase in temperature suggests that warming would lead Israeli farmers to shift mainly to orchards under cover and irrigation. But it is likely that bundling adaptations will provide flexibility and sustainability for future farmers in many locations under climate change conditions.     

Gender Inequality in the Spanish Public Pension System

This contribution studies revenue sharing in the public pension system in Spain from a gender perspective, revealing that differences are evident in the percentage of men and women entitled to different types of pensions and in the average fiscal amount per pension for men and women. Using 2010 data, the study analyzes how labor market conditions are reflected in pension type and amount for women pensioners, yielding two important conclusions: the income of women pensioners decreases, relative to men, with age; and the degree of inequality of pensions among women is lower than that among men. These gender differences owe to the contributory character of the system, which reproduces the labor market inequalities of both genders – inequalities that ultimately derive from the social division of roles in which women remain responsible for unpaid care work. This conclusion is consistent with similar studies on other European countries and world regions.     

Gender earnings inequality in the service and manufacturing industries in the U.S.

This paper compares earnings inequality between women and men in a growing sector of the U.S. economy – the service sector, and a shrinking sector – manufacturing. We examine the hypothesis that deindustrialization will reduce inequality, and find that the absolute magnitude of the gender earnings gap is, in fact, smaller in the service sector. Decomposition analysis is used to partition the gender earnings gap into three parts: (1) earnings differences due to differences in mean characteristics – such as education and experience; (2) earnings differences due to preferential treatment of men; and (3) earnings differences due to disadvantageous treatment of women. The latter two constitute estimates of gender discrimination. The results of this study suggest that, ceteris paribus, deirndustrialization will likely reduce the gender gap in hourly earnings. However, this will come at the cost of lower earnings for both males and females, with the drop in earnings being particularly large for males. While deindustrialization is predicted to reduce the absolute magnitude of male-female earnings inequality, evidence suggests that gender discrimination will persist – discrimination explains about 60 percent of the gender wage gap in both the service and the manufacturing sectors.     

Nonlinearity in medical expenditures: a new semiparametric approach

Research in empirical health economics has found that the relationship between medical expenditures and age, income and other variables can be highly nonlinear. Moreover, men and women can have quite different medical expenditure patterns due to their differences in life expectancy. Thus it may be difficult to find an appropriate parametric model to capture the highly complicated nonlinearity in medical expenditures, and introducing a simple gender dummy variable in a parametric model may not reveal all the medical expenditure differences between men and women. This study takes a semiparametric approach. In particular, an additive partially linear specification is employed to study the relationship between medical expenditures and age, income, gender and other individual characteristics. Using data from the National Medical Expenditure Survey, the results indicate that the semiparametric approach taken in this study is very promising. They confirm that medical expenditures are nonlinear in income and age, and that men and women have quite different medical expenditure patterns.     

Understanding the Remittance Gender Gap among Hispanics in the US: Gendered Norms and the Role of Expectations

Using the 2006 Latino National Survey (LNS), this study analyzes the existence of a gender gap in favor of men in the monetary remittance behavior of Hispanics residing in the United States. Findings indicate that cultural gender norms and expectations in the country of origin play a key role. The study shows that women migrants are less likely to remit than men and, when they do, they transfer smaller amounts. The remittance gender gap is not universal among subgroups, since it is only observable among Hispanics who came to the US to improve their economic situation, plan to return to their home country, and have low income and low schooling. An index on migrants’ perceptions of gender roles as a proxy for cultural gendered norms is constructed and shows that more traditional gender views are associated with a significant gender gap in favor of men in remittances.     

REASSESSING THE IMPACT OF BARRIERS TO CAPITAL ACCUMULATION ON INTERNATIONAL INCOME DIFFERENCES*

Can barriers to capital accumulation account for large differences in GDP per capita? We reconsider the claim that these barriers have an amplified effect on income levels in a model where both modern and traditional sector technologies are active. We show that this claim is not correct. We do find, however, that the removal of barriers to capital accumulation can cause large changes in the employment shares of labor. Thus the model can account for an important stylized fact of the development process, with labor moving from the traditional to the modern sector as income levels rise.     

New evidence on public sector wage differentials

This paper examines the nature of wage differentials for men and women in the public sector, using a sample selection approach. This includes the self-selection that occurs in the sectoral choice process as well as the selection that arises in context of the labour force participation decision of men and women. Using 1991 Current population Survey data, it is found that male workers in the public sector on an average earn higher wages than male private sector workers, whereas the wage premium earned by women is undermined by a slightly greater degree of discrimination in the public sector     

Security of property rights and transition in land use

Price and yield uncertainty are traditional considerations in agricultural markets and their impact on development. Agricultural producers in transition economies face an additional risk factor – changes in the institutional protection of property rights. This paper illustrates how institutional uncertainty may affect investment, land use, and crop mix patterns. In particular, in the Ukrainian example, the rights of tenants are viewed as uncertain in anticipation of establishment of an open market for sale of agricultural land. Establishment of the land market in Ukraine has been postponed several times over the last 15 years and a significant number of lease contracts are not formalized. A large panel of farm-level data was used to show that a higher share of rented land is associated with a lower share of land used for investment intensive perennial crops controlling for prices and other factors. The difference in response to uncertainty is found to be significant among three crop types: perennials, grains and oil crops. The implication is that the lower level of protection of use rights and uncertainty regarding the future regulation of land sales market lead to under-investments in more capital intensive crops. As a result, tenants deviate from the optimal crop mix, reducing the productivity of tenant farms. Farms under 200 ha are affected most negatively as they are less likely to be able to access the level of legal and political protection enjoyed by large farms.     

Opening the Farm Gate to Women? The Gender Gap in U.S. Agriculture

Abstract:

This article provides an empirical analysis of the gender gap for farming in the United States. Using the 2012 U.S. Census of Agriculture we show that farms operated by women earn forty percent less farm income than farms operated by men after controlling for farm and operator characteristics. These findings indicate that farming is one of the most unequal professions in the United States today. Further, we investigate whether three forms of sustainable agriculture improve incomes for women farmers. We find that only farms engaging in Community Supported Agriculture experience a marked decline in the gender income gap.     

Alternative Estimator for Industrial Gender Wage Gaps: A Normalized Regression Approach

Using normalized regression equations, we propose an alternative estimator of industrial gender wage gaps which is identified in the sense that it is invariant to the choice of an unobserved non‐discriminatory wage structure, and to the choice of the reference groups of any categorical variables. The proposed estimator measures the pure impact of industry on gender wage gaps after netting out wage differentials due to differences in characteristics and their coefficients between men and women. Furthermore, the proposed estimator is easy to implement, and hypothesis testing is straightforward. We compare the proposed estimator with existing estimators using samples from the 1998 US Current Population Survey.     

Using a Choice Experiment to Estimate Farmers’ Valuation of Agrobiodiversity on Hungarian Small Farms

Agrobiodiversity is a crucial environmental resource. Much of the agrobiodiversity remaining in situ today is found on the semi-subsistence farms of poorer countries and the small-scale farms or home gardens of more industrialised nations. The traditional farms of Hungary are an example. Labelled “home gardens” as a reflection of their institutional identity during the collectivisation period, they are micro-agroecosystems that provide important functions such as food security and diet quality. This paper applies the choice experiment method to estimate the private benefits farmers derive from four components of the agrobiodiversity found in Hungarian home gardens: richness of crop varieties and fruit trees; crop landraces; integrated crop and livestock production; and soil micro-organism diversity. The analysis is based on primary data collected in three environmentally sensitive areas where pilot agri-environmental programmes have been initiated as part of the Hungarian National Rural Development Plan. Findings demonstrate variation in the private values of home gardens and their attributes across households and regions, contributing to understanding the potential role of home gardens in these agri-environmental schemes. This study has implications for sustaining agrobiodiversity in transitional economies.     

Accounting for age in marital search decisions

Spouse quality, measured by educational attainment, varies significantly with the age at which an individual marries, peaking in the mid-twenties then declining through the early-forties. Interestingly, this decline is much sharper for women than men, meaning women increasingly marry less educated men as they age. Moreover, quality has worsened for educated women over several decades, while it has improved for men. Using a non-stationary sequential search model, we identify and quantify the search frictions that generate these age-dependent marriage outcomes. We find that single-life utility is typically the dominant friction, though college women in the 1950 and 1970 cohorts are affected even more by deteriorating suitor quality. Regardless of educational status, individual choice (as opposed to pure luck) is pivotal in explaining marriage market outcomes earlier in life.     

Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction in Korea: When Gender Matters

Using detailed longitudinal data from the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study (KLIPS) from 1998 to 2008, this paper finds significant gender differences in impacts as well as adaptation patterns to major life and labor market events in Korea. Men remain on a higher happiness level throughout marriage, while women return to their baseline happiness within only two years. Consequently, men suffer more from divorce and the death of a spouse. This marital gender happiness gap is equivalent to a (husband only) increase of annual per capita household income of approximately US$17,800. The study further finds that men suffer more from unemployment. Results are robust to the inclusion of multiple simultaneous events and the use of different estimators.     

Intermarriage and the labour-force participation of immigrants: differences by gender

Studies of the impact of intermarriage on labour market outcomes of immigrants focus on labour-force participants. However, intermarriage itself can change participation options and heterogeneously so for men and women. Using data from the 2010 American Community Survey, we find that the raw impact of intermarriage is to reduce labour-force participation for men and increase it for women. However, upon controlling for observable and unobservable selection into intermarriage, the gains from intermarriage for women are reversed. The importance of human capital controls of education and experience in determining the labour-force participation of married immigrants is underscored. Birthplace fixed effects play an important role in explaining the gender differences in labour-force participation among intermarried immigrants.