The effect of poor vision on economic farm performance: Evidence from rural Cambodia
Frederik Sagemüller,
Selina Bruns and
Oliver Musshoff
PLOS ONE, 2022, vol. 17, issue 9, 1-20
Abstract:
Roughly one-fifth of the global population is affected by poor visual acuity. Despite the fact that inhabitants of rural areas in low-income countries are most distressed by this, no prior research has studied the impact of poor visual acuity on the economic performance of farms. We conduct a standardized eye test with 288 farm managers in rural Cambodia and find that around 30 percent of our sample suffers from poor visual acuity in terms of nearsightedness (myopia). Our analyses indicate a statistically significant and economically meaningful association of poor visual acuity with economic farm performance. Our results show that gross margins for cropping activities per year could be, on average, around 630 USD higher if farm managers were able to correct for poor vision. Our results suggest that poor visual acuity impairs farm managers from tapping the full potential of their business, which in turn decreases their chance to break the vicious cycle of poverty.
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0274048 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 74048&type=printable (application/pdf)
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:plo:pone00:0274048
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0274048
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().