Is EU Support to Malawi Agriculture Effective?
Wouter Zant
No 12-090/V, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute
Abstract:
See also The Economics of Food Aid under Subsistence Farming with an Application to Malawi in 'Food Policy', 2012, 37(1), 124-141.
We measure the impact of the Farmers Income Diversification Program (FIDP), an EU funded program implemented in Malawi from late 2005 onwards, aiming at increasing agricultural productivity, diversification, value addition, commercialization and trade of subsistence farmers. The geographical spread of the implementation of FIDP is exploited to identify its impact. Computations are based on annual data by Extension Planning Area, 198 in total, fully covering Malawi, for the period 2003-04 to 2009-10. The estimations support a statistically significant impact of FIDP on agricultural productivity, with increases reaching 20% to 24% relative to base period levels, with a lag of at least one year after the start of the program and increasing over the years. Evidence on diversification of crop income is less strong but still suggests increases ranging from 5% to 10%. Results are robust for instrumental variables, synthetic controls, clustering of standard errors and inclusion of additional covariates.
Keywords: agricultural policy; impact evaluation; subsistence farming; Malawi; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F35 O13 O55 Q11 Q13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-09-07
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)
Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.tinbergen.nl/12090.pdf (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:tin:wpaper:20120090
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 ().