Essays On Agricultural Productivity In Sub Saharan Africa
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Essays On Agricultural Productivity In Sub Saharan Africa
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Author : Aziza Kibonge
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2013
Essays On Agricultural Productivity In Sub Saharan Africa written by Aziza Kibonge and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2013 with Agriculture categories.
Agriculture is the predominant sector in many of SSA (Sub-Saharan Africa) countries, capable of enhancing the economic development process while reducing poverty. However, the performance of this sector in SSA has been low compared to other developing countries, characterized by fluctuations over the decades. This study looks at the evolution of total factor productivity (TFP) growth rates, technical change and efficiency change in 41 countries in SSA, from 1960 to 2006. It also examines the potential role of institutions and political variables, climatic factors and water scarcity, as well as CO2 emissions from deforestation. The first chapter examines the association between agricultural productivity rates and institutions. The results show an annual growth in TFP of 0.6% with technical change playing a major role in determining TFP. Variables such as colonial heritage and years of independence are shown to contribute in explaining the gap in countries performance. The second chapter provides a better understanding of the role of climatic factors (precipitation, irrigation, drought and temperature) on total agricultural productivity rates. The effect of water is explicitly incorporated in productivity measurements using an indicator of drought developed from the standard precipitation index. Results suggest that agricultural productivity is sensitive to climate variability; Precipitation and temperature have a positive effect on agricultural production. Once drought and irrigation are accounted for, the gap in countries performance decreases and increases respectively. The third chapter is an attempt to "correct" TFP measurement in SSA's agriculture for CO2 produced as a result of land clearing needed in agriculture. The results suggest that (i) when CO2 is a joint output of the sector using an output distance function, TFP growth rates are higher as the same amount of inputs are used to produce two outputs instead of one; (ii) When CO2 emissions due to land clearing are treated as an input using a production function, it is effectively treated as a 'bad' output, and punishes the sector with lower TFP growth rates..
Essays On Agricultural Productivity Youth Employment And Human Capital Investment In Sub Saharan Africa
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Author : Josephat Koima
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2021
Essays On Agricultural Productivity Youth Employment And Human Capital Investment In Sub Saharan Africa written by Josephat Koima and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2021 with Electronic dissertations categories.
This dissertation focuses on the intersection of agricultural productivity, youth employment, and investments in human capital development in Sub–Saharan Africa (SSA). Agriculture is a dominant employer and source of income in SSA, and plays an important role in youth employment and educational attainments.In Chapter 1, we study the role of structural transformation in the labor reallocation between the farm and the non–farm sector and the consequential impact on worker demographics. Specifically, we investigate whether agricultural productivity differentially reallocates labor by age and gender. We develop a theoretical model where increased land productivity leads to younger individuals sorting into the non–farm sector while older individuals sort into agriculture. We then use data from Zambia in our empirical analysis. Our main results show some evidence of productivity affecting labor reallocation within recent productivity lags (last 2 years) but not when longer productivity lags (4 or 6) are considered. Specifically, consistent with our model prediction, a 10% increase in a 2–year lagged moving average of productivity decreases the probability of farming by 0.3 percentage points among youth (15–24) and older youth (25–34). We also show that youth (15–24) also exit farming following increased productivity. Increased productivity tends to reduce the intensity of farming across all age groups but the reduction is relatively larger among the youth. In addition, young men are more likely to exit business activity as productivity increases relative to young women – across all productivity lags. In the short term (2–lags), while youth exit farming, there is no differential outcome between genders. However, among older youth, males are more likely to exit farming compared to women. Finally, males mainly drive the reduction in intensity of farming. Overall, while we find some evidence in favor of our hypotheses, the evidence is generally limited to the short term and the marginal effects are quantitatively small.Chapter 2 investigates the impact of agricultural productivity on human capital investments in Tanzania. Agriculture remains a major source of employment and income in Tanzania. Therefore, any agricultural productivity shocks are likely to affect educational investment decisions. Our results provide evidence that increased agricultural productivity boosts spending on uniform, contributions and total academic expenses. We find positive but statistically non–significant effects of productivity on study times. In addition, we find no evidence of heterogeneous effects by student gender. We show evidence that productivity effects are smaller in female–headed households. Finally, we find some evidence that post–primary students experience larger impacts compared to primary school students.In Chapter 3, I investigate the impact of primary school electrification on academic outcomes in Kenya. Between 2014 and 2016, the number of primary schools with electricity rose from 56% to 94%. Schools near the grid network were connected to grid electricity while those further received solar photovoltaics. Using this rapid electrification expansion as a source of identifying variation in a panel fixed effects model, the paper estimates the impact on school test scores, enrollment, and completion. The paper also attempts to quantify the effects of lighting on education performance by relying on the off–grid (solar) electricity coefficients. Using a universe of 8th grade students in public schools in Kenya, the paper finds no evidence that electricity affects test scores or enrollment in the short run. However, off–grid electrification increases completion by 1%. Using off–grid estimates, the paper concludes that lighting has a small positive impact on completion but not on test scores or enrollment.
Essays On Agricultural Productivity And The Impact Of Food Price Change On Welfare In Africa
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Author : Manzamasso Hodjo
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2020
Essays On Agricultural Productivity And The Impact Of Food Price Change On Welfare In Africa written by Manzamasso Hodjo and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2020 with categories.
Africa is the most food-insecure continent in the world, according to the World Bank and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. While low purchasing power is the main cause of food insecurity, inefficient domestic food production is also a major constraint. Our study specifically focused on four food production issues in Africa, namely, agricultural productivity, cropland use, food demand and welfare analysis, and demand-led crop breeding. First, we assessed the impact of public spending on agricultural productivity in Africa. We estimated the effect of two government-spending measures: Agriculture Budget Share (BS) and Research Share of Agricultural GDP (RS) on agriculture total factor productivity growth (TFPG). We used a panel fixed-effect estimator to control for the country-specific characteristics of twenty-eight African economies from 1991-2012. Although North African economies appeared to have the highest TFPG, this did not translate into the highest agricultural and research budget share. Meanwhile, Central African economies exhibited the lowest BS and RS, along with the lowest TFPG of the continent. The panel fixed-effect estimator revealed a marginal impact of 6.77% for RS on TFPG after seven years. However, the cumulative marginal impact of BS on TFPG is estimated at 7.21% over the eight years that follow the budget increment. Our findings suggest that a BS of 14% and a RS of 15% are required for a country to double its TFPG in the eight following years. Therefore, additional, and continuous investment in research and development is required for a significant productivity enhancement, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. Second, we assessed the factors that shape cereal cropland allocation decisions in Nigeria and Niger. We theoretically derived the key cropland allocation arguments using the household model. Next, we used the World Bank LSMS-ISA data to map acreage mean centers and fit a fractional regression model using the panel fixed-effect estimator. We assessed the traditional Mendelsohn land use model and uncovered its limitation in efficiently approximating cereal cropland allocation. We improved the appropriateness of fit of the traditional Mendelsohn model by controlling for additional factors, such as food prices, socio-demographics, and food trade factors. Overall, we found cereal acreage shares in Nigeria and Niger to be spatially heterogeneous and determined by climatic, price, and trade factors. Additionally, farmers tend to base their cropland allocation decisions upon the price of the most important staples: maize in Nigeria; millet and sorghum in Niger. Furthermore, due to their tolerance to heat and drought, sorghum and millet compete for northeast farmland in both countries, especially for rainfed croplands. Thus, our study illustrates that millet and sorghum are key choices in ensuring food security in the context of global warming and rainfall instability. Our findings fill a literature void and provide policy makers with evidence to foster geo-referenced farmer cooperatives aimed at enhancing food production. Furthermore, our findings could be incorporated into a land use framework for planning, environmental monitoring, scenario analysis, and impact assessment. The third essay analyzed the staple foods consumption patterns of households in Niger by estimating a complete demand system. Demand elasticities are estimated using the Niger 2011 and 2014 LSMS-ISA household survey data to fit the modified Linear AIDS model. The results indicated that food consumption patterns in the country are affected by income and prices, as well as by socio-economic and geographic factors. All food items have positive expenditure elasticities and negative own-price elasticities, with rice exhibiting the most elastic demand. We found millet to be a necessity while rice and sorghum are luxuries. Additionally, our analysis revealed that urban households had a more diversified staple demand pattern. Furthermore, the welfare analysis revealed that an increase of millet price reduces rural welfare more than an increase in sorghum price. On the other hand, a sorghum price increase adversely affects the welfare of urban households the most. For example, a 20% increase of the millet or sorghum price reduces the average household welfare by 5.88% and 4.38%, respectively. This study highlights the importance of estimating staple food demand elasticities for both research and policymaking during a food price shocks. Our findings revealed that millet price is the canal that might foster support programs targeting the poorest households in Niger. Our fourth and last essay is a theoretical argument for demand-led breeding in a small-scaled farming system. Our investigation stems from the fact that agricultural productivity lags in small-scaled farming in Sub-Saharan Africa. While inadequate production capital, water control and poor infrastructure remain important challenges, the low adoption of improved and high-yielding varieties is a key limiting factor for productivity enhancement. Often, studies elucidating improved technology implementation are focused upon the adoption (demand) rather than the creation (supply). In this analytical essay, we reviewed theoretical causes and solutions to low varietal uptake for sorghum. Consistent with much of the structural research framework, we presented asymmetric information, bounded rationality, and weak intellectual property as key causes of seed market coordination failure. Leaning on the technology adoption under uncertainty model, we showed how market-induced uncertainty, compounded with other factors, reduces farmers' willingness to trade traditional seeds for improved ones. Furthermore, we used the matching theory, supported with a general equilibrium model, to show how consumer preference drives farm-level adoption. We argued that breeding programs can benefit from effective preference matching across the food value chain while leveraging on the growing demand-led breeding literature. Finally, we presented hypotheses that can be empirically used to assess stakeholders' weigh and ranking of varietal attributes across the food value chain.
Agriculture In Africa
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Author : Luc Christiaensen
language : en
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Release Date : 2017-10-25
Agriculture In Africa written by Luc Christiaensen and has been published by World Bank Publications this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2017-10-25 with Business & Economics categories.
Stylized facts set agendas and shape debates. In rapidly changing and data scarce environments, they also risk being ill-informed, outdated and misleading. So, following higher food prices since the 2008 world food crisis, robust economic growth and rapid urbanization, and climatic change, is conventional wisdom about African agriculture and rural livelihoods still accurate? Or is it more akin to myth than fact? The essays in “Agriculture in Africa †“ Telling Myths from Facts†? aim to set the record straight. They exploit newly gathered, nationally representative, geo-referenced information at the household and plot level, from six African countries. In these new Living Standard Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture, every aspect of farming and non-farming life is queried—from the plots farmers cultivate, the crops they grow, the harvest that is achieved, and the inputs they use, to all the other sources of income they rely on and the risks they face. Together the surveys cover more than 40 percent of the Sub-Saharan African population. In all, sixteen conventional wisdoms are examined, relating to four themes: the extent of farmer’s engagement in input, factor and product markets; the role of off-farm activities; the technology and farming systems used; and the risk environment farmers face. Some striking surprises, in true myth-busting fashion, emerge. And a number of new issues are also thrown up. The studies bring a more refined, empirically grounded understanding of the complex reality of African agriculture. They also confirm that investing in regular, nationally representative data collection yields high social returns.
Essays On Agricultural Trade In Sub Saharan Africa
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Author : Obie Cannon Porteous
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2016
Essays On Agricultural Trade In Sub Saharan Africa written by Obie Cannon Porteous and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2016 with categories.
This dissertation consists of two essays on agricultural trade in sub-Saharan Africa. The 42 countries of continental sub-Saharan Africa include 21 of the 24 poorest countries in the world. Unlike industrialized countries where structural transformation and income growth have led to declines in the share of agriculture in overall output and consumption, nearly two-thirds of the labor force in sub-Saharan Africa still works in agriculture and nearly half of consumer expenditure is on food. Agricultural products are produced by tens of millions of farmers and consumed by hundreds of millions of consumers across Africa. In this dissertation, I show that the costs of trade between producers and consumers in different locations are very high, I explore the consequences of these high trade costs, and I evaluate the effects of a type of trade policy that has been used to insulate markets in particular countries from high and volatile prices elsewhere. My findings can be used to improve the design and understand the impact of infrastructure investment, trade liberalization, agricultural technology adoption, and price stabilization initiatives in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world. In the first chapter, I estimate and solve a dynamic model of agricultural storage and trade in sub-Saharan Africa using a new intra-national dataset of monthly prices and production of the 6 major staple grains from 2003 to 2013 and a new approach to identify cost parameters when trade and storage are unobserved. The model includes monthly storage in each of 230 large hub markets in all 42 countries of continental sub-Saharan Africa, monthly trade between them, as well as monthly trade with the world market through 30 ports. I find median intra-national trade costs over 5 times higher than elsewhere in the world along with significant extra costs for trade across borders and with the world market. I then simulate a counterfactual in which trade costs for staple grains are lowered to match an international benchmark. Lowering trade costs results in a 46% drop in the average food price index, a 42% loss of net agricultural revenues, and a welfare gain equivalent to 2.2% of GDP. I show that 86% of this welfare gain can be achieved by lowering trade costs through ports and along key links representing just 18% of the trade network, supporting a corridor-based approach for infrastructure investment and trade policy. In an extension, I find that the effects of agricultural technology adoption depend crucially on trade costs, with technology adoption increasing farmer incomes only when trade costs are low. Compared to my dynamic monthly model with storage, a static annual model of agricultural trade underestimates trade costs by 23% and welfare effects by 33% by failing to correctly identify when trade occurs. In the second chapter, I investigate the empirical effects of temporary export restrictions, which have been widely used by many countries in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere in recent years in an attempt to stabilize domestic prices of staple grains. I use monthly, market-level price data from a 10-year period during which 13 short-term export bans on maize were implemented by 5 countries in East and Southern Africa. I find no statistically significant effect of export bans on the price gaps between pairs of affected cross-border markets. My results for price gaps match those from a simulation of the model developed in the first chapter in which export bans are not implemented. However, prices and price volatility in the implementing country are significantly higher during export ban periods in the data than in the model simulation with no bans. Export bans in the region are imperfectly enforced, divert trade into the informal sector, and appear to destabilize domestic markets rather than stabilizing them.
An Updated Look At The Recovery Of Agricultural Productivity In Sub Saharan Africa
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Author : Alejandro Nin Pratt and Bingxin Yu
language : en
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Release Date :
An Updated Look At The Recovery Of Agricultural Productivity In Sub Saharan Africa written by Alejandro Nin Pratt and Bingxin Yu and has been published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on with Social Science categories.
Essays On Farm Productivity
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Author : Jacques C. Julien
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2020
Essays On Farm Productivity written by Jacques C. Julien and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2020 with Agricultural productivity categories.
Agricultural productivity is critical for the development of many sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries where the farming sector plays a key role in the economy. An important issue concerns evidence of the inverse relationship between farm size and productivity in developing countries, which has been documented over many decades. Despite the accumulated evidence, this relationship, which has been attributed to a variety of factors, remains a puzzle for development economists. This dissertation provides new evidence concerning the inverse relationship (IR) hypothesis by addressing several shortcomings found in the literature and applying state-of-the-art stochastic frontier methods, such as the true random effects model (Greene, 2005a) and a random parameters stochastic frontier (RP-SPF) model (Tsionas, 2002; Greene, 2005b) to account for time-varying inefficiency and unobserved heterogeneity. This dissertation also offers novel analyses concerning agricultural productivity differences between male and female farmers in Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda using a multiple-step methodology. The analysis focuses on productivity and efficiency gaps as well as on testing land and labor market imperfections for both groups of farmers.
Accounting For Disparity
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Author : Melanie Seama O'Gorman
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2007
Accounting For Disparity written by Melanie Seama O'Gorman and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2007 with categories.
This thesis consists of three essays which focus on accounting for the sources of economic inequality in various contexts. The first two essays focus on disparity of agricultural labour productivity across the developing countries, while the third analyzes racial earnings inequality. The main goal of these essays is to shed light on some of the mechanisms which have generated these types of inequality, in order to better design policies for ameliorating them. The first essay is empirical, while the second and third essays construct general equilibrium models so as to quantitatively assess the importance of proposed sources of inequality. The first essay finds that a large proportion of the variation of the level and growth of agricultural labour productivity across a sample of developing countries can be explained by variation in input use across countries. I demonstrate that our understanding of disparity of labour productivity in developing country agriculture can be significantly improved by accounting for variation in the adoption of high-yielding seed varieties and for correlation between input use and technological change across countries. The second essay analyzes the factors which have contributed to agricultural stagnation in Sub-Saharan Africa, despite productivity improvements in agriculture in other developing regions. I construct a quantitative model which can match average Sub-Saharan African trends of agricultural labour productivity, crop yields and input use from 1965 to 2000. The model points to key factors which have constrained agricultural productivity growth over this period, and to the need for diverse yet concerted policies to arrest this stagnation. The third essay presents a quantitative model which sheds light on racial earnings inequality in the U.S., South Africa and Brazil. This model indicates that a large proportion of the racial wage gap in these three countries can be attributed to differential human capital accumulation by race. Most notably, distortions created by the explicit, racially-biased education system which existed in South Africa during Apartheid can explain roughly three quarters of the racial wage gap in South Africa in the early 1990's.
Essays On Agriculture And Demography In Developing Countries
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Author : Siyao Jessica Zhu
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2019
Essays On Agriculture And Demography In Developing Countries written by Siyao Jessica Zhu and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2019 with categories.
This dissertation is composed of three essays that explore agriculture and demography issues in developing countries. The first two chapters investigate smallholders' agricultural technology adoption decisions in Mozambique and Tanzania, respectively. The third chapter examines the impacts of skewed sex ratios in Paraguay. All essays are motivated by the analysis of how individuals' behaviors and decisions are affected by various factors, such as personal characteristics, exogenous treatments and conflicts, and culture norms. To address these topics, both data collected through a field experiment and nationally representative surveys are used, while different methods are applied -- experiment, structural model, and reduced-form analysis. Despite the importance of agriculture sector and the availability of technologies that enhance yields, smallholders in Sub-Saharan Africa persistently use traditional farming methods and face low agricultural productivity. In the first chapter, which is coauthored with Florence Kondylis and Valerie Mueller, we investigate which channels can diffuse and boost adoption of productive farming practices. Specifically, we conduct a large-scale randomized field experiment in Mozambique to measure the impact of augmenting the contact farmer (CF) model with a direct CF training on the diffusion of a new technology. Moving forward with the information transmission and promotion channel research, I examine the rationale behind small-scale farmers' adoption decisions in my second chapter. There is a well-known technology adoption puzzle: Why do African farmers not adopt modern technologies that economists believe should provide higher returns on average, for example fertilizer, and at the same time why do African farmers adopt traditional technologies that economists consider unprofitable, for example intercropping? I build a structural model, estimate it with data from Tanzania, and offer an explanation to this puzzle. The third chapter, which is coauthored with Jennifer Alix-Garcia, Laura Schechter, and Felipe Valencia Caicedo, explores another central theme in the field of development economics, gender. Using the event of the War of the Triple Alliance, we examine both the short-term and the long-term impacts of a temporary variation in sex ratios on the economies, such as the marriage market and labor market performances.
Agricultural Development In Asia And Africa
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Author : Jonna P. Estudillo
language : en
Publisher: Springer Nature
Release Date : 2023
Agricultural Development In Asia And Africa written by Jonna P. Estudillo and has been published by Springer Nature this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2023 with Agriculture categories.
This Open Access book explores the multifaceted nature of agricultural and rural development in Asia and examines the extent to which the Asian experience is being replicated in contemporary Africa. This volume compiles the works of top scholars who provided analyses and evidences from household-level surveys collected for many years in several parts of Asia and Africa. The most important finding presented in this book is that African agricultural development has evolved following the pathways of Asian agricultural development. The common pathways are borrowed technology from abroad and adaptive research in rice farming; secured property rights on natural resources; adoption of ICTs; investments in human capital, including training; and launching of the high-value agriculture. In both continents, agricultural development started in the crop sector, which had a strong tendency to induce the dynamic development of other sectors in rural areas. [Resumen de la editorial]