Is participatory social learning a performance driver for Chinese smallholder farmers?

Huanxiu Guo and Sébastien Marchand

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: This paper aims to test the effect of smallholder farmers' participatory social learning on their gain of performance in a village of southwest China. By exploring a panel structure survey data collected in the village, we identify the social learning effect using a Spatial Autoregressive (SAR) model. Particularly, we calculate the technical efficiency and environmental efficiency from a SFA model and use them as dependent variables of the model. Moreover, we investigate the social learning of different technologies, i.e., conventional and organic farming, by separating the estimations. Our identification results suggest that the effect of social learning is weak due to the technological heterogeneity in the general case, whilst it is significantly positive for organized organic farming. However, it appears that farmers learn to improve their economic performance (i.e., maximize yield) rather than environmental performance (i.e., minimize environmentally detrimental input). These results reveal a critical limitation of social learning, and demand more environmental orientation in the agricultural extension service, which is expected to guide smallholder farmers and foster their environmental performance for sustainable agricultural development.

Keywords: China; Smallholder farming; Social learning; Organic farming; Technical efficiency; Environmental efficiency; China. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-10-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-env and nep-tra
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00878886v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00878886v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Is participatory social learning a performance driver for Chinese smallholder farmers? (2013)
Working Paper: Is participatory social learning a performance driver for Chinese smallholder farmers? (2013)
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:hal:wpaper:halshs-00878886

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().