Public Agricultural Expenditure Efficiency and Food Security in Sub-Saharan African Countries: Cash Crops or Food Crops?

Arrouna Keita ()
Additional contact information
Arrouna Keita: University of Orl´eans

No 2024.17, Working Papers from International Network for Economic Research - INFER

Abstract: This study investigates the Public Agricultural Expenditure Efficiency (PAEE) in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, focusing on the impact of the proportion of cash crops production on this efficiency. We first compute the Bias-corrected Technical Efficiency (BTE) Scores of 39 SSA countries from 2003 to 2017, using the Bootstrap Data Envelopment Analysis method, with per capita public agricultural expenditure as input, and food security indicators as output. Second, we assess the effect of cash crops share in harvested land (CSHL) on the PAEE using Beta regression. (i) our results show that in most SSA countries(79%), CSHL is on average less than 15%. (ii) findings indicate a significant positive effect of CSHL on the PAEE, suggesting that a higher proportion of cash crops in agricultural production enhances food security. (iii) results for SSA countries where CSHL is high are in line with the aim of the commitments made by African countries in Maputo (2003) declarations to fight hunger by allocating at least 10% of their public spending to agriculture—aligning with the Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger by 2030. Our results are robust to a battery of robustness tests.

Keywords: Public agricultural spending efficiency; food security; zero-hunger SDG; Sub- Saharan Africa; DEA-Bootstrap (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-agr, nep-dev and nep-eff
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://infer-research.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/WP2024.17.pdf First version, 2024 (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:inf:wpaper:2024.17

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from International Network for Economic Research - INFER Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Pedro Cerqueira ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).