Secondary towns, agricultural prices, and intensification: evidence from Ethiopia

Joachim Vandercasteelen, Seneshaw Tamru Beyene, Bart Minten and Johan Swinnen

No 579601, Working Papers of LICOS - Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), LICOS - Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance

Abstract: Urbanization is happening fast in the developing world and especially so in sub-Saharan Africa where growth rates of cities are among the highest in the world. While cities and, in particular, secondary towns, where most of the urban population in sub-Saharan Africa resides, affect agricultural practices in their rural hinterlands, this relationship is not well understood. To fill this gap, we develop a conceptual model to analyze how farmers’ proximity to cities of different sizes affects agricultural prices and intensification of farming. We then test these predictions using large-scale survey data from producers of teff, a major staple crop in Ethiopia, relying on unique data on transport costs and road networks and implementing an array of econometric models. We find that agricultural price behavior and intensification is determined by proximity to a city and the type of city. While proximity to cities has a strong positive effect on agricultural output prices and on uptake of modern inputs and yields on farms, the effects on prices and intensification measures are lower for farmers in the rural hinterlands of secondary towns compared to primate cities.

Keywords: urbanization; cities; secondary towns; Ethiopia; sub-Saharan Africa; agricultural prices; intensification (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-04
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in LICOS - Discussion paper series 393/2017 , pages 1-41

Downloads: (external link)
https://lirias.kuleuven.be/retrieve/449328 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Secondary towns, agricultural prices, and intensification: evidence from Ethiopia (2017)
Working Paper: Secondary towns, agricultural prices, and intensification: Evidence from Ethiopia (2017)
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:ete:licosp:579601

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of LICOS - Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), LICOS - Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance
Bibliographic data for series maintained by library EBIB ().