Market Imperfections and Land Productivity in the Ethiopian Highlands

This study analyses how market imperfections affect land productivity in a degraded low‐potential cereal‐livestock economy in the Ethiopian highlands. A wide array of variables is used to control for land quality in the analysis. Results of three different selection models were compared with least squares models using the HC3 heteroskedasticity‐consistent covariance matrix estimator. Market imperfections in labour and land markets were found to affect land productivity. Land productivity was positively correlated with household male and female labour force per unit of land. Female‐headed households achieved much lower land productivity than male‐headed households. Old age of household heads was also correlated with lower land productivity. Imperfections in the rental market for oxen appeared to cause overstocking of oxen by some households. Conservation technologies had no significant positive short‐run effect on land productivity. The main results were consistent across the different econometric models.     

Labour,nature, and exploitation: Social metabolism and inequality in a farming community in mid‐19th century Catalonia

Exploiting the labour of other people has historically been one of the main strategies to tackle the biophysical tension that always exists between the satisfaction of human needs and the labour required to fulfil them. Based on the insights of ecological, feminist, and Marxist economics, we disentangle the exploitation of the labour of women and labouring poor through a novel methodology that integrates energy, material, time, and cash balances. We apply it to the sociometabolic flows between household units endowed with different land and livestock resources in a traditional rural community in Catalonia (Spain) in the mid‐19th century. The results show that land and livestock hoarding led to a process of accumulation through dispossession that increased the exploitative relationships through the labour market, which in turn relied on the patriarchal division of labour between men and women at home. Our estimates of energy labour surplus reveal that male wages represented 88% of the equivalent consumption basket that would have been obtained by carrying out the same amount of labour on land of one's own. However, in the case of female wages, the percentage was 54%. This shows that wage labour incorporated a significant amount of unpaid domestic family labour.     

Market-based grazing land transfers and customary institutions in the management of rangelands: Two case studies on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau

Beginning in the early 1990’s, grazing lands once held in common were contracted to individual households in the rangeland regions of China. The resulting fragmentation of rangelands has led to ecological and social problems. As China seeks to address intractable poverty and rangeland degradation, attention has turned to rental, or transfer, of contracted grazing land as a market-based approach to re-aggregating grazing land into larger units that support economies of scale. However, given that many pastoral regions still maintain community customary institutions, what the relationship between market mechanisms and local customary institutions should be in rangeland management needs further analysis. This paper applies comparative case studies of two types of relationships between market mechanisms and customary institutions: (1) market mechanisms that replace customary institutions in the case of Axi village, and (2) market mechanisms that are embedded within customary institutions in Xiareer village. This allows contrast of the impacts of differing approaches on livelihoods, livestock production, and wealth differentiation among pastoral households. We found that there is a higher level of livestock mortality, lower livestock productivity, and higher livestock production cost in Axi Village compared to Xiareer Village. In addition, household asset levels are higher and there is less income differentiation in Xiareer Village. It is concluded that embedding market mechanisms within customary institutions has had notable benefits for the herders of Xiareer Village, because it is a better fit to the coupled pastoral social-ecological system. Based on these findings, we argue that in pastoral communities where the rangeland transfer system for contracted grazing land has not yet been implemented, it is critical to reconsider China’s current policy approach to pay greater attention to the innovative management systems being developed in local regions. Instead of considering market-based approaches as oppositional to traditional institutions, options that derive from the interaction of market-based and customary institutions should be considered.     

Market and Other Factors Affecting Farm Specific Production Efficiency in Pig Production in Vietnam

ABSTRACT

In developing country production environment, farm production efficiency is often measured in terms of on-farm resources and producer characteristics. In this paper we postulate that input and output market related factors also influence farm production decisions hence its efficiency. Stochastic frontier production function was used to assess technical efficiency and its determinants including input and output market variables for a sample of 1962 pig farms in Vietnam with data collected in 1999. There are significant differences in production behavior and efficiency level between the North and the South, among farms producing different breeds, between mixed and specialized farms, between household and commercial farms, and among producers located in different agro-ecological regions. Access to better output market, land size, herd size, and education of household head significantly reduced inefficiency, while access to government supplied inputs, age of household head, female headed households and family supplied crude feeds significantly increased inefficiency in both the regions. The direction of influence on efficiency differs between the two regions for access to credit, proportion of output sold at market rather than at farm gate and family labor supply. Generally, market related factors had more consistent influence on production efficiency in the South of Vietnam where the experience of market economics is longer compared to the North. Policy actions on providing better extension, more timely access to better quality inputs through the private sector, making credit more easily accessible to smallholders and opportunity to sell output at better priced secondary markets are expected to increase productivity and reduce inefficiency.     

Livestock and land share contracts in a Hindu society

This article examines factors related to a livestock rental market in western Nepal and assesses whether this market is associated with caste differentiation and land rental market participation. Theoretical models for asset‐rich (i.e., high‐caste) households, rich in land and livestock, and asset‐poor (i.e., low‐caste families) households are presented to provide logical explanations for the existence of a livestock rental market and the synergy between livestock and land rental markets participation. A combination of double hurdle models and bivariate‐ordered probit models were used to test the implications of the models. Consistent with the theoretical models, land‐ and livestock‐rich high‐caste households were more likely to rent out land and/or livestock, whereas land‐ and livestock‐poor and credit constrained low‐caste households were more likely to rent livestock and land from others. Participation in the two markets was positively correlated, indicating a synergistic relationship that may be due to production and transaction costs reducing benefits. Policies that can enhance the allocative efficiency of livestock and land rental markets can improve equity as well as efficiency of land use in Nepal. Provision of livestock credit to land‐poor low‐caste households is also crucially dependent on their access to more long‐term contracts for land.     

Considering Technical and Allocative Efficiency in the Inverse Farm Size–Productivity Relationship

In the leading explanations for the oft‐observed inverse relationship (IR) between farm size and productivity in developing country agriculture, labour market imperfections have commonly occupied a central role. However, an emerging literature suggests that disparities in technical or allocative efficiency may be driving productivity differentials. Using nationally‐representative panel data from Nicaragua, we develop and employ a four‐stage empirical framework to simultaneously test the competing explanations for the IR. While efficiency differences exert a significant impact on all productivity indicators, their explanatory power is insufficient to rule out labour market imperfections as the driving force behind the relationship.     

Women’s Labour Contribution to Productivity and Efficiency in Agriculture: Empirical Evidence From Bangladesh

This article examines the contribution of women’s labour input to productivity and efficiency in crop farming using a large survey dataset of 1,839 households from 16 villages in two agro‐ecological regions of Bangladesh. Results reveal that female labour accounts for a substantial 28% of total labour use (mainly supplied from the family) and contributes significantly to productivity as well as technical efficiency. Contrary to expectation, the cost share of female labour input is significantly higher than the male share, and has a substitution relationship with all other inputs, including male labour. The estimated mean level of technical efficiency is 0.90, implying that crop output might be increased by 10% by eliminating technical inefficiency. Both male and female education have a significant impact on improving technical efficiency. Other significant technical efficiency shifters are farming experience, family size and crop diversification. Owner operators are found to be technically inefficient relative to the tenants. Policy implications include creation of a hired labour market for female labour so that more women can be involved in the production process, and can contribute to towards improving productivity and efficiency. In addition, investment in education for both men and women, strategies to promote crop diversification and effective regulation/modification of the tenancy market will significantly improve technical efficiency in this case.     

Tenants’ land access in the rental market: evidence from northern Ethiopia

The purpose of this study is to investigate the allocation efficiency in the tenancy market, and thereby the potential of the market to facilitate operational farm size adjustment that can help land‐poor tenant households to transform into smallholder commercial farms. We analyzed three rounds of balanced panel data for the production seasons 2005–2006, 2009–2010, and 2014–2015 collected from 320 smallholder farms in Tigrai region in northern Ethiopia. Random effects dynamic probit and tobit models are used to assess how land‐poor tenants’ access and extent of access to land are affected by state dependency (earlier participation in the market), kinship ties, climate shocks, and legal restrictions. The results indicate that state dependency and kinship ties with the landholder had strong positive effects on participation and intensity of participation. Climate shocks significantly affected the intensity of participation of tenants already in the rental market. Tenants’ overall access to rented land had not improved from 2005–2006 to 2014–2015. The amount of land accessed by those already in the market was insufficient for them to become commercial farmers. The important policy implication is that orchestrated interventions at community level are needed to reduce transaction costs and thereby improve land access of entrepreneurial tenants.     

Assessing the Impact of the ‘Decoupling’ Reform of the Common Agricultural Policy on Irish Farmers’ Off‐farm Labour Market Participation Decisions

This paper assesses the impact of the ‘decoupling’ reform of the Common Agricultural Policy on the labour allocation decisions of Irish farmers. The agricultural household decision‐making model provides the conceptual and theoretical framework to examine the interaction between government subsidies and farmers’ time allocation decisions. The relationship postulated is that ‘decoupling’ of agricultural support from production would probably result in a decline in the return to farm labour but it would also lead to an increase in household wealth. The effect of these factors on how farmers allocate their time is tested empirically using labour participation and labour supply models. The models developed are sufficiently general for application elsewhere. The main findings for the Irish situation are that the decoupling of direct payments is likely to increase the probability of farmers participating in the off‐farm employment market and that the amount of time allocated to off‐farm work will increase.     

Testing Household-Specific Explanations for the Inverse Productivity Relationship

The inverse relationship between land productivity and farm size is an old and puzzling empirical regularity. Most explanations for this relationship rely on market imperfections that jointly determine the farm size and the household's shadow price of some productive inputs. We use plot-level data from the ICRISAT/VLS to assess whether these household-specific theories can explain the puzzle. The data exhibit plots of different sizes being simultaneously cropped by the same household. The inverse relationship is shown to hold true with the same magnitude across the plots of each household, thus cross-household heterogeneity does not suffice to explain the puzzle.     

Agricultural production and children's diets: evidence from rural Ethiopia

We study the relationship between pre‐school children's food consumption and household agricultural production. Using a large household survey from rural Ethiopia, we find that increasing household production diversity leads to considerable improvements in children's dietary diversity. However, we also document how this nonseparability of consumption and production does not hold for households that have access to food markets. These findings imply that nutrition‐sensitive agricultural interventions that push for market integration are likely to be more effective in reducing under‐nutrition than those promoting production diversity.     

Smallholder agriculture in transition economies

In this paper, we analyse how smallholder farms have evolved during the transition process in former communist countries and how this process has differed across countries and commodities. The role of smallholders in agriculture differs among transition countries, and this diversity is due to a combination of factors, including capital, labour and land endowments, income levels, scale economies, market imperfections, and reform choices. Institutions to access inputs and sell outputs affect the efficiency and survival of smallholders. In the past decade, the share of smallholders in land use and production has declined significantly as younger and more dynamic smallholders have become integrated in modern value chains, whereas older, less dynamic farmers have (semi‐)retired, producing only for household consumption.     

Does Conservation Agriculture Change Labour Requirements? Evidence of Sustainable Intensification in Sub-Saharan Africa

Population growth, increasing wealth and changing diets require agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa to intensify to meet future food demand and ensure food security in the region. Conservation agriculture can increase yields in the long run and reduce the negative environmental impacts of intensive farming. In changing the mix of resources used and how they are managed, the adoption of conservation agriculture can have a direct impact on farm labour. We study the relationship between conservation agriculture and labour input requirements as observed in five Sub-Saharan African countries. We focus on the amount of work required and the source of the work employed (household or hired, by gender, by children and by production stage). We apply multinomial endogenous switching regression models on a panel of household and farm data from Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania. We find that conservation agriculture increases farms’ labour input requirements. Higher demand is driven by more work during the harvesting and threshing stages. Increases in labour requirements are usually met by household labour, not paid work. The workload change is also higher for women than for men, and, in certain cases, is met by children.     

China's booming livestock industry: household income, specialization, and exit

China's production of livestock products has generally kept pace with her rapidly increasing demand. Over-supply and market corrections for various livestock products took place over the latter part of the 1990s and large numbers of householders exited this type of production. Using household survey data, we estimate the relationship between a household's specialization in livestock production and household net income in 1995, and use a logit model to explore some predictors of household exit from livestock production over the following decade of market instability. We conclude that specialist livestock households with access to necessary skills, technologies, and markets increase their incomes from further livestock specialization in the base year, whereas those to whom livestock production is relatively unimportant can increase household incomes by diverting their resources away from animal husbandry. It was specialist rather than diversified livestock households that tended to bear the brunt of the adjustment to unfavorable price movements over the decade post-1995. Policy concerns include the exit of larger-scale specialized producers who tended to earn relatively high household incomes in 1995, barriers to the effective formation and operation of horizontal and vertical integration options to help mitigate market instability, the further development of insurance programs and markets for livestock producers, and development assistance to livestock households that for various reasons cannot increase scale and specialization.     

Access to a Telephone and Factor Market Participation of Rural Households in Bangladesh

This paper assesses the impact of access to a telephone on rural households’ factor market opportunities. It answers two questions. First, does the use of a telephone have any impact on rural households’ factor market participation? Second, correcting for market participation, does the use of a telephone have any impact on the type of factor market participation? For the first question, the paper uses a bivariate probit to correct for omitted variable bias and for the second question, the paper uses a two‐stage probit. The empirical findings suggest that access to a telephone has a significant positive impact on factor market participation. The difference in market participation between telephone users and non‐users is around 14%. However, once a household participates in the market, the use of a telephone does not have any impact on specific factor market participation.     

Property rights reform to support China’s rural ‐ urban integration: household‐level evidence from the Chengdu experiment

In 2008, as part of a national experiment, Chengdu prefecture implemented ambitious property rights reforms including complete registration of all land together with measures to ease transferability and eliminate migration restrictions. Results from a difference‐in‐difference analysis of the National Statistics Bureau's regular household survey suggest that the reforms increased consumption and income, in particular for less wealthy and less educated households, with estimated benefits well above the cost of implementation. Local labour supply increased with the young shifting towards agriculture and the old towards off‐farm employment. The reforms also contributed to higher agricultural yields and profits through three channels, namely: (i) greater rental market activity that transferred land to more productive producers; (ii) substitution of purchased inputs for labour; and (iii) a shift out of grains towards vegetables, corn, and oilseeds all of which offer higher levels of profitability. All of these findings are consistent with the notion that, without reforms, imperfections in factor markets undermined investment and functioning of land and labour markets, preventing high‐value peri‐urban land from being used most effectively and reducing job creation.     

中国农户土地租佃行为实证研究

本文利用福建省和黑龙江省的农户调查样本数据，通过建立土地租佃行为的经济计量模型，从微观层面定量分析了影响农户土地租佃行为的各种因素。计量结果表明，农户土地租佃行为受到户主年龄、户主是否接受过专业技术培训、家庭劳动力人数、人均纯收入、非农收入比重、农户是否饲养役畜、交易成本等多方面因素的影响，并随着这些因素的变化而不断变化。     

Off-farm labour allocation decisions in small-scale rural households in Zimbabwe

The double hurdle model is used to analyse the off‐farm labour decisions of small‐scale agricultural household members in the Shamva District of Zimbabwe. The approach permits the joint modelling of the decision to participate in the labour market and the decision regarding the amount of time allocated to work. Results indicate that a number of variables (notably, gender, education and assets) indeed have effects which are qualitatively and quantitatively different in terms of participation and hours worked. Overall, the empirical analysis confirms the importance of individual characteristics (such as gender and education) and household/farm characteristics (e.g. land area accessible to the household, productive assets, remittances and the agricultural terms of trade) in influencing the labour market decisions of rural household members.     

城乡统筹视角下的集体建设用地市场发育测度及影响因素研究 ——以30个入市改革试点为例

研究目的:探究中国当前集体建设用地市场的构建和发育情况及其与国有建设用地市场的关系,分析影响集体建设用地市场发育程度的因素。研究方法:面积比重测度法,逐步最小二乘法。研究结果:(1)各试点区县的集体土地市场发育程度分化明显,除广东(0.77)、广西(0.53)外,各试点区县的市场发育指数均不超过0.4;(2)集体建设用地市场发育指数主要受建设用地需求和地方政策两方面的影响,而试点时长和经济发展水平影响不显著。研究结论:受国有建设用地市场影响,在近郊和乡村,集体建设用地市场的构建和发育遵循不同的逻辑;在市场发育初期,地方政府应主动构建有效的市场机制和增值收益分配机制,以培育城乡统一的建设用地市场。