Should African rural development strategies depend on smallholder farms ? an exploration of the inverse productivity hypothesis

Talip Kilic, Donald F. Larson, Tomoya Matsumoto, Keijiro Otsuka, Talip Kilic, Donald F. Larson, Tomoya Matsumoto and Keijiro Otsuka
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Tomoya Matsumoto, Talip Kilic, Keijiro Otsuka () and Donald F. Larson ()

No 6190, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: In Africa, most development strategies include efforts to improve the productivity of staple crops grown on smallholder farms. An underlying premise is that small farms are productive in the African context and that smallholders do not forgo economies of scale -- a premise supported by the often observed phenomenon that staple cereal yields decline as the scale of production increases. This paper explores a research design conundrum that encourages researchers who study the relationship between productivity and scale to use surveys with a narrow geographic reach, when policy would be better served with studies based on wide and heterogeneous settings. Using a model of endogenous technology choice, the authors explore the relationship between maize yields and scale using alternative data. Since rich descriptions of the decision environments that farmers face are needed to identify the applied technologies that generate the data, improvements in the location specificity of the data should reduce the likelihood of identification errors and biased estimates. However, the analysis finds that the inverse productivity hypothesis holds up well across a broad platform of data, despite obvious shortcomings with some components. It also finds surprising consistency in the estimated scale elasticities.

Keywords: Food Security; Agricultural Growth and Rural Development; Rural Settlements; Climate Change and Agriculture; Crops and Crop Management Systems; Inequality; Rural Labor Markets; Labor Markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-09-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-agr and nep-eff
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (35)

Downloads: (external link)
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/68482146 ... ivity-hypothesis.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Should African rural development strategies depend on smallholder farms? An exploration of the inverse-productivity hypothesis (2014)
Working Paper: Should African Rural Development Strategies Depend on Smallholder Farms? An Exploration of the Inverse Productivity Hypothesis (2012)
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:wbk:wbrwps:6190

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().