Not your average job: Measuring farm labor in Tanzania

Vellore Arthi, Kathleen Beegle, Joachim De Weerdt and Amparo Palacios-Lopez

Journal of Development Economics, 2018, vol. 130, issue C, 160-172

Abstract: Understanding the constraints to agricultural growth in Africa relies on the accurate measurement of smallholder labor. Yet, serious weaknesses in these statistics persist. The extent of bias in smallholder labor data is examined by conducting a randomized survey experiment among farming households in rural Tanzania. Agricultural labor estimates obtained through weekly surveys are compared with the results of reporting in a single end-of-season recall survey. The findings show strong evidence of recall bias: people in traditional recall-style modules reported working up to four times as many hours per person-plot as those reporting labor on a weekly basis. Recall bias manifests both in the intensive and extensive margins of labor reporting: while hours are over-reported in recall, the number of people and plots active in agricultural work are under-reported. The evidence suggests that this recall bias is driven not only by failures in memory, but also by the mental burdens of reporting on highly variable agricultural work patterns to provide a typical estimate. All things equal, studies suffering from this bias would understate agricultural labor productivity.

Keywords: Recall error; Measurement error; Farm labor; Agricultural productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C8 O12 Q12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (57)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387817300846
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Not your average job: measuring farm labor in Tanzania (2016)
Working Paper: Not your average job: measuring farm labor in Tanzania (2016)
Working Paper: Not your average job: measuring farm labor in Tanzania (2016)
Working Paper: Not your average job: measuring farm labor in Tanzania (2016)
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:deveco:v:130:y:2018:i:c:p:160-172

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2017.10.005

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig

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