Is the agricultural sector cursed too? Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

Elizavetta Dorinet, Pierre-André Jouvet and Julien Wolfersberger

World Development, 2021, vol. 140, issue C

Abstract: Extractive and agricultural resources do not have the same impact on poverty reduction and can compete with each other. We examine how extractive resource windfalls affect agricultural productivity, measured as the amount of output per worker in the agricultural sector. This is important since agricultural productivity is a key element of structural transformation and poverty reduction. To do this, we exploit a panel dataset of 38 countries over 1991-2016 and construct a country-specific commodity price index that captures resource-related gains and losses in aggregate disposable income. We find that an increase in the commodity price index leads to a drop in agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan economies. Among the possible mechanisms to explain this result, our findings highlight the lack of spillovers across sectors and the low level of agricultural investment in autocratic regimes, both related to the exploitation of extractive resources. We also find that higher agricultural productivity is positively associated with the release of workers towards manufacturing and services, confirming its importance for structural transformation.

Keywords: Agricultural productivity; Structural transformation; Natural resource curse; Sub-Saharan Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X20303776
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Is The Agricultural Sector Cursed Too? Evidence From Sub-Saharan Africa (2021)
Working Paper: Is the agricultural sector cursed too? Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:140:y:2021:i:c:s0305750x20303776

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105250

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().