Too small to be beautiful? The farm size and productivity relationship in Bangladesh

Madhur Gautam and Mansur Ahmed

Food Policy, 2019, vol. 84, issue C, 165-175

Abstract: This paper examines the agricultural productivity-farm size relationship in the context of Bangladesh. Features of Bangladesh’s agriculture help overcome several limitations in testing the inverse farm-size productivity relationship in other developing country settings. A Stochastic Production Frontier (SPF) model is applied using data from three rounds of a household panel survey to simultaneously estimate the production frontier and the technical inefficiency functions. The ‘correlated random effects’ approach is used to control for unobserved heterogeneous household effects. Methodologically, the results suggest that SPF models that ignore the inefficiency function are likely mis-specified, and may result in misleading conclusions on the farm size-productivity relationship. Empirically, the findings confirm that the farm size and productivity relationship is negative, but with the inverse relationship diminishing over time. Total factor productivity growth, driven by technical change, is found to have been robust across the sample. Across farm size groups, the relatively larger farmers experienced faster technical change, which helped them to catch up and narrow the productivity gap with the smaller farmers.

Keywords: Bangladesh; Agricultural productivity; Stochastic frontier; Technical change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306919218302434
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:jfpoli:v:84:y:2019:i:c:p:165-175

DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2018.03.013

Access Statistics for this article

Food Policy is currently edited by J. Kydd

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