Assessing the Impact of Crop Diversification on Farm Poverty in India

Pratap Birthal, Devesh Roy and Digvijay Negi ()

World Development, 2015, vol. 72, issue C, 70-92

Abstract: Crop diversification into high-value crops (HVCs) can be a strategy to improve livelihood outcomes for farmers. Using data from a nationally representative survey, we establish that households diversifying toward HVCs are less likely to be poor, the biggest impact being for smallholders. Furthermore, using continuous treatment matching, we establish the relationship between degree of diversification (share of area dedicated to HVC) and poverty. Growers of HVCs need to allocate at least 50% area to HVCs to escape poverty. Effect of diversification on poverty is in general positive but it withers after a threshold probably because of constraints i.e., capital on smaller farms and labor on larger ones.

Keywords: high-value crops; diversification; binary treatment; continuous treatment; instrumental variable (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (49)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X15000480
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:wdevel:v:72:y:2015:i:c:p:70-92

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2015.02.015

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 ().