the political economy of agriculture for development today the small versus large scale debate revisited the role of agriculture in economic development and the development politics of promoting smallholder versus large scale agriculture have both been at the center of a long lasting and controversial debate using an innovative methodology which combines a value chain approach with input output analysis the growth multipliers and productivity of both farm types in guatemala are analyzed results show that smallholder agriculture has the same potential to stimulate output growth as large scale agriculture smallholder value chains include mainly informal sectors and create more jobs than commercial agriculture therefore a reorientation of agricultural and land policies toward small scale food producers and within a comprehensive policy of integrated rural development is not only necessary in terms of social equity but also for boosting economic development

is there a future for small farms small farms are seriously challenged today in ways that make their future precarious marketing chains are changing and becoming more integrated and more demanding of quality and food safety this is creating new opportunities for farmers who can compete and link to these markets but threatens to leave many others behind in developing countries small farmers also face unfair competition from rich country farmers in many of their export and domestic markets the viability of many is further undermined by the continuing shrinkage of their average farm size and the spread of hiv aids is further eroding the number of productive farm family workers and leaving many children as orphans with limited knowledge about how to farm left to themselves these forces will curtail opportunities for small farms overly favor large farms and lead to a premature and rapid exit of many small farms adding to already serious problems of rural poverty and urban ghettos if small farmers are to have a viable future then there is a need for a concerted effort by governments ngos and the private sector to create a more enabling economic environment for their development appropriate interventions could unleash significant benefits in the form of pro poor agricultural growth in many developing countries and more than pay for themselves in terms of their economic and social return but they do not seem very likely at the moment and current trends are moving in the opposite direction

can unobserved land quality explain the inverse productivity relationship abstract an inverse relationship between both farm productivity and labor intensity and farm size is a common empirical finding in developing country agriculture the traditional explanation has been imperfect labor markets recently it has been suggested instead that the inverse relationship is a statistical artifact resulting from omitted land quality using a farm level data set from java i investigate whether omitted variable bias can explain the inverse relationship i show that the inverse relationship and accompanying wage responses are inconsistent with a model of neoclassical farm behavior that ignores omitted variable bias instrumental variables techniques yield parameter estimates in which the inverse relationship is eliminated and the estimated wage elasticities are more in line with economic theory further econometric investigation hints that a model of omitted land quality may be a possible source of the inverse relationship these results emphasize the importance of considering the sources of cross sectional variation in estimating microeconomic relationships

profit efficiency among basmati rice producers in pakistan punjab farm specific profit inefficiency among basmati rice producers was estimated from a variable coefficient profit frontier the mean level of inefficiency at farm resources and price levels was 28 with a wide range 5 87 average loss of profit was rs 1 222 per hectare socioeconomic factors related to profit loss were the farm household s education nonagricultural employment and a credit constraint institutional determinants of profit loss were a water constraint and the late application of fertilizer punjab wide benefits of increasing farmer s profit efficiency are large a 25 reduction in profit loss among basmati rice producers may generate over rs 240 million in extra profits each rice season rice is a major export commodity for pakistan generating about 2 5 billion pakistan rupees rs annually or 20 of foreign exchange earnings from commodity trade in the early 1980s two varieties dominate in pakistan s international trade in rice basmati 370 a high quality long grained aromatic variety and the medium long grained irri 6 distinct export markets exist for these rices over 90 of the basmati is exported to oil rich middle eastern nations while the mediumlong varieties are mainly marketed in southeast asia in 1983 the export price of basmati was about rs 7 900 per ton while the price of medium long grained varieties averaged rs 2 700 per ton pakistan has a comparative advantage in the international market for basmati but probably not for medium long grained rices azhar and mamhud historically pakistan had a near monopoly in international trade in basmati but now faces increased competition from thailand and the united states efferson therefore pakistan must strive to increase the efficiency of basmati production to retain its comparative advantage and competitive edge in foreign rice markets basmati 370 is a pure line selection made in

the inverse relationship between size of land holdings and agricultural productivity the important relationship between the size of land holdings and agricultural productivity in developing countries has been debated intensely from early soviet debates to the extensive literature generated by the release of farm management survey fms data in india the question of returns to scale and input productivities primarily for land in traditional agriculture has been confused and clouded by strong positions and ideological predilections bhagawati and chakravarty saini 1969 and bharadwaj provide extensive bibliographies on the theoretical and empirical aspects of this problem in the indian context briefly sen 1964 1966 mazumdar 1963 1965 c h h rao 1966 1970 khusro saini 1971 bhattacharya and saini more or less endorse an inverse relationship between the land size and its productivity a p rao 1963 and rudra and bandhopadhyay do not believe in the existence of an inverse relationship and argue that no systematic relationship can be established between any two variables describing land size and productivity bharadwaj and others dismiss the statistical validity of an inverse relationship but generally accept it as a stylized fact the approach used in these statistical studies is to employ aggregate average or farm level data within a village or among different villages for all crops or a few specific ones various concepts of productivity and input variables are used the actual regressions use linear or log linear functional forms using the pooled fms data for several states in south india this paper makes an attempt to reexamine in a more general way the relationship between the size of land holdings and agricultural productivity this study employs the transcendental logarithmic translog function to formalize the relation between output and an arbitrary number of inputs the translog function is not locally constrained by assumptions of homogeneity or additivity estimates of output elasticity with respect to land size for various values of cooperating inputs will indicate whether the alleged inverse relationship holds in any or all circumstances

economic relationship between access to land and rural poverty in nepal in the present socio economic structure of nepal land is the main source of income and consumption for the majority of nepalese this study analyses the economic relationship between access to land and poverty in nepal by establishing the link between land and consumption as well as land and income a generalised additive model gam and ordinary least squares ols demonstrate that greater access to land increases income and consumption of the household and thereby reduces poverty the significant marginal value of land for both consumption and income implies that an effective land reform policy could well be an effective approach to alleviate rural poverty however land reform must come as part of a larger overhaul cluster analysis shows that land reform should target appropriate subgroups within the community in order to differentiate those who would make use of the extra land from those who would not and apply appropriate strategies to each subgroup it reveals the importance of subgroups in determining an appropriate strategy for tackling poverty

farm size land yields and the agricultural production function an analysis for fifteen developing countries abstract the paper analyzes the relationship between factor inputs land yields and labor productivity for farms of different size on the basis of fao farm management data for 15 developing countries for all but three countries a strong negative correlation is found between farm size on the one side and factor inputs and yields per hectare on the other the fitting of unconstrained production functions to the above data suggests that in only few cases the decline in yields for increasing farm size can be attributed to decreasing returns to scale the higher yields observed in small farms are mainly to be ascribed to higher factor inputs and to a more intensive use of land therefore where conspicuous labor surpluses exist the superiority of small farming provides solid arguments in favor of land redistribution such an agrarian reform would determine higher output higher labor absorption and a more equitable income distribution thus contributing in a decisive manner to the alleviation of rural poverty the paper also provides estimates of cross sectional production functions for the 15 countries analyzed empirical relations are found between the output elasticities of land labor and intermediate inputs and physical indicators of their scarcity the paper concludes by proposing a simple method for deriving a long term production function for agriculture

access to capital and its impact on agrarian structure and productivity in kenya access to capital and its distribution across agents can profoundly shape the structure and performance of an agrarian market economy it is conceptually useful to distinguish between ex ante and ex post capital access ex ante capital access denotes the ability of agents to finance production costs e g labor and purchased inputs costs which must be paid ex ante that is prior to the actual realization of production ex post capital access that is access to capital after the realization of the production process is of particular importance as an insurance substitute in low income agrarian economies where contingency markets are imperfect buoyant ex post capital access would permit an individual to stabilize consumption year to year even as production fluctuates annually a number of theoretical models have ex

agrarian structure and agricultural practice typology and application to western sudan a typology of models that explain patterns of variation in farm endowments and farm practices and yields shows that insecurity in renting land financing constraints and the absence of insurance generate patterns of factor use quite different from the famous inverse relationship caused by labor supervision problems one might expect to observe positive relationships between wealth and yields village level data from western sudan confirm that such positive relationships are not a theoretical curiosity wealthy farmers have higher levels of output per hectare because they use more labor per hectare insurance and financing constraints appear to be the crucial market failures

missing ness in action selectivity bias in gps based land area measurements land area is a fundamental component of agricultural statistics and of analyses undertaken by agricultural economists while household surveys in developing countries have traditionally relied on farmers own potentially error prone land area assessments the availability of affordable and reliable global positioning system gps units has made gps based area measurement a practical alternative nonetheless in an attempt to reduce costs keep interview durations within reasonable limits and avoid the difficulty of asking respondents to accompany interviewers to distant plots survey implementing agencies typically require interviewers to record gps based area measurements only for plots within a given radius of dwelling locations it is therefore common for as much as a third of the sample plots not to be measured and research has not shed light on the possible selection bias in analyses relying on partial data due to gaps in gps based area measures this paper explores the patterns of missingness in gps based plot areas and investigates their implications for land productivity estimates and the inverse scale land productivity relationship using multiple imputation mi to predict missing gps based plot areas in nationally representative survey data from uganda and tanzania the paper highlights the potential of mi in reliably simulating the missing data and confirms the existence of an inverse scale land productivity relationship which is strengthened by using the complete multiply imputed dataset the study demonstrates the usefulness of judiciously reconstructed gps based areas in alleviating concerns over potential measurement error in farmer reported areas and with regards to systematic bias in plot selection for gps based area measurement

premature deagriculturalisation land inequality and rural dependency in limpopo province south africa cross national regressions reveal abnormally low agricultural workforce shares given gnp in developing countries that had historically concentrated land into large capital intensive farms we argue that such deagriculturalisation was premature since its concomitant labour shedding has undesirable outcomes in a new south african survey a large proportion of rural households and working age persons was dependent relying for income almost wholly on either migrant remittances or pensions a separate group with less poverty and unemployment relied mainly on local including own farm income the group was heavily over represented in one of the three regions where many more households had significant land

inverse productivity or inverse efficiency evidence from mexico abstractusing a unique panel data set from rural mexico we find strong evidence of a negative relationship between farm size and both productivity and technical efficiency large farms not only have a lower value of output per hectare than small farms they also produce further from the efficiency frontier our findings suggest that in spite of the ongoing transformation of agricultural supply chains and economists recommendations for small farmers to exit crop production there may be sustained advantages for smallholder farms our analysis offers new insights into inverse farm size relationship the productivity efficiency relationship and the use of stochastic frontier techniques

access to capital and agrarian production organisation there are two problems both universal that entrepreneurs in any economy must contend with firstly an agent generally has access only to a limited amount of working capital secondly workers hired by an agent are subject to moral hazard and this necessitates their supervision this paper models for an agrarian economy the constraints imposed on entrepreneurs activities by these two problems and endogenously determines the various organisational forms of production as well as the allocation of resources that will obtain with a simple model we endeavour to explain a diverse set of empirical observations pertaining to the less developed countries in terms of the general processes that determine the distribution of income among the various agents and the hierarchical relationships that develop among them agricultural production typically involves a period of several months between the time the inputs are purchased and the time the output is marketed access to working capital and hence to the credit market thus plays an important role in a farmer s production decisions the distribution of access to credit in turn tends to be an important determinant of income distribution in poor agrarian economies credit is invariably rationed according to the ability to offer collateral the amount of working capital a farmer can mobilise therefore depends on the amount of land he owns which is often a good proxy for his overall wealth and thus his ability to offer collateral further since hired hands have a propensity to shirk they need to be supervised and therefore the

household resources transaction costs and adjustment through land tenancy this paper examines the role of household endowments of imperfectly tradeable factors of production e g male female child labor and draft animals on land leasing an explicit attempt is made to account and test for the role of transaction costs on the incidence and extent of adjustment taking place through the land lease market the econometric model is implemented using pooled data from six villages in the semiarid region of india the results confirm the significant role of nontradeable family endowments and indicate the presence of frictions in the land tenancy market

happiness and health two paradoxes abstract this paper aims to establish systematic relationships between the two rapidly growing research streams on the socio economic determinants of happiness and health although they have been pursued quite independently by different communities of researchers empirical evidence points to very similar underlying causal mechanisms in particular in both cases per capita income seems to play a major role only up to a very low threshold beyond which relative income and other relational factors become crucial for happiness and health on the basis of these structural analogies we argue that a process of cross fertilisation between these two research streams would contribute to their development by clarifying the relationship between happiness health and their determinants finally we observe that the two literatures have converging policy implications measures meant to reduce poverty and inequality and invest in social and environmental capital may improve both health and happiness of the individuals

buen vivir living well in ecuador community and environmental satisfaction without household material prosperity article i nfo this paper provides a quantitative approach to assessing whether the subjective wellbeing swb of ecuadorian people is dependent on income and employment or on more distinctive features relating to buen vivirethos the latter are reflected in the indigenous buen vivir ideology based mainly on relations with the community the environment and food sovereignty the empirical analysis shows that both buen vivir features and factors such as income and unemployment status are significant in the models explaining swb accordingly economic policies should take into account the buen vivir ethos that seems to be important for the swb of the ecuadorian people this supports the conservationist political position which focuses on protecting the environ ment and people s traditional livelihoods rather than the extractive view which regards people s welfare as merely dependent on income 2014 published by elsevier b v 1 in this paper we use the expressions buen vivir ethos buen vivir philosophy buen vivir ideologyorbuen vivirfeatures to refer to this original buen vivir that has grown from indigenous traditions harmonious coexistence with nature power sharing relationships and collective rights sense of community and local and primary production of food in a community s own territory for self consumption a compilation of texts on buen vivirphi losophy in the indigenous tradition can be found in hidalgo capitan et al 2014

testing between competing models of sharecropping the marshallian approach assumes a prohibitively high cost of monitoring the sharecropper s activities while the monitoring approach argues that landlords stipulate and effectively monitor sharecroppers activities i present new evidence using detailed data collected from eight indian villages most tenants own some land of their own this provides a controlled environment in studying the impact of contractual arrangements the differences in input and output intensities on owned minus sharecropped land of the same household are found to be sizable and significant suggesting a rejection of the monitoring approach and supporting the notion of the marshallian productive inefficiency of sharecropping

land reform as commenced business the evidence against stopping abstract in the new paradigm institutions are long term endogenous thus the aims of land reform must be compatible with replace or substitute for initial incentives and power structures many reforms e g compulsory collectives are not redefinition of land reform is therefore needed yet the case for private land redistribution with ceilings remains the inverse relationship rests firmly on lower cost labor transactions in small farms though large but competitive transport or processing firms which enjoy lower cost capital transactions may be needed crucial is the impact of the postreform structure on livelihoods especially for the growing rural majority near landless workers new style market based reforms have potential probably best combined with old style ceilings substantial compensation with urban taxpayers sharing costs alternative off farm prospects and progressive taxes on large landholdings or bequests

wealth weather risk and the composition and profitability of agricultural investments despite the growing evidence that farmers in low income environments are risk averse there has been little empirical evidence on the importance of risk in shaping the actual allocation of production resources among farmers differentiated by wealth the authors use panel data on investments in rural india to examine how the composition of productive and nonproductive asset holdings varies across farmers with different levels of total wealth and across farmers facing different degrees of weather risk income variability is a prominent feature of the experience of rural agents in low income countries the authors report evidence based on measures of rainfall variability that the agricultural investment portfolio behavior of farmers in such settings reflects risk aversion due evidently to limitations on consumption soothing mechanisms such as crop insurance or credit markets the authors results suggest that uninsured weather risk is a significant cause of lower efficiency and lower average incomes a one standard deviation decrease in weather risk measured by the standard deviation of the timing of the rainy season would raise average profits by up to 35 percent among farmers in the lowest wealth quartile moreover rainfall variability induces a more unequal distribution of average incomes for a given distribution of wealth wealthier farmers are willing to absorb significant risk without giving up profits to reduce production risk smaller farmers have to invest their limited wealth in ways that reduce their exposure to risk at the cost of lower profit rates the authors found that at high levels of rainfall variability differences in rates of profit per unit of agricultural assets were similar across classes of wealth but over the sample range of rainfall variability these rates of profit were always higher for the poorer farmers than for the wealthier ones suggesting that the disadvantages of small farmers in risk diffusion are more than offset by their labor cost advantage

do land markets improve land use efficiency evidence from jiangsu china inefficient use of scarce and fragmented land challenges the sustainability of agriculture land markets may improve land use efficiency in recent years china has employed various instruments to

how well do tree plantations comply with the twin targets of the clean development mechanism the case of tree plantations in tanzania the clean development mechanism cdm of the kyoto protocol is supposed to provide both carbon mitigation and poverty reduction this article reports from a model based study of market related carbon leakage and poverty reduction in the wake of a cdm tree planting project in tanzania a tree plantation was incorporated in a computable general equilibrium cge model with income differentiated household segments the study focused on sensitivity of carbon leakage and income distribution to different project ownerships and carbon premium allocations it turned out that the project value in terms of carbon premium has clear shortcomings as indicator of induced gdp growth and poverty alleviation the non poor rural and urban households benefit considerably more than the poor households however rising household income in all domestic project ownership arrangements increases demand for food raises use of fertilizer and crop yields a carbon cycle module for agricultural land use was incorporated in the cge model showing an increased carbon sequestration in agricultural soil representing a negative leakage through markets in the range of 60 120 of the certified emissions reductions as registered in the cdm tree plantation project

modern value chains and the organization of agrarian production empirical studies of agrarian production in developing countries often find that small farms possess a productivity advantage over larger farms eswaran and kotwal 1986 famously derive this inverse farm size productivity relationship from the structure of agrarian production the focal prediction of their model is that in otherwise equivalent economies a more egalitarian land distribution raises both output and producer welfare the traditional spot procurement system implicit in the eswaran and kotwal model however diverges fundamentally from modern contractual procurement practices we therefore develop a new model of agrarian production in order to determine whether the introduction of a modern value chain alters the welfare effects of land redistribution the inverse farm size productivity relationship persists in our model but we find that more egalitarian land distribution leads to nonmonotonic changes in producer welfare we also find that the introduction of a modern sector can harm the laboring classes

the future of small farms trajectories and policy priorities summary while smallholder development has in the past led to reductions in poverty and hunger does this still apply in today s more globalized world this paper reviews the debates on the contemporary role of agriculture in development and the case for small farms in light of the rise of supermarkets lower commodity prices and liberalized trade agricultural research funding environmental change hiv aids and changing policy ideas although the answers vary greatly by context for many low income countries smallholder development remains a key option the policy agenda however has changed in addition to providing public goods the growing challenge is to overcome market failures which is largely a matter of institutional innovation

isolation and agricultural productivity this article examines the mechanisms that transmit isolation into productivity in particular we study the effect of isolation and transport infrastructure on welfare and agricultural productivity in the case of madagascar madagascar is a good case study given the bad shape of its infrastructure and therefore the significant variation in isolation based on comprehensive household survey data combined with a census of communes we discover a strong poverty isolation relationship further we find the inverse relationship between agricultural productivity and isolation to be surprisingly strong we isolate the following reasons why productivity might decline with isolation i transportation induced transaction costs ii the inverse relationship between plot size and productivity iii increasing price variability and extensification onto less fertile land and iv insecurity

should african rural development strategies depend on smallholder farms an exploration of the inverse productivity hypothesis 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

household composition labor markets and labor demand testing for separation in agricultural household models this paper tests the separation of farm labor supply and labor demand decisions using the observation that household composition is an important determinant of farm labor use with nonseparation after assessing the conditions under which the test has power against several alternatives an empirical model is developed to test the proposition that farm employment is independent of family composition the model is estimated on a data set from rural java the null hypothesis that farm labor allocation decisions are independent of household structure is not rejected the results are robust to different specifications of the labor demand function copyright 1992 by the econometric society

on price risk and the inverse farm size productivity relationship abstract the oft observed inverse relationship between farm size and productivity has elicited several explanations having important policy and theoretical implications using advances in the analysis of price risk effects on producer behavior and a simple two period model of an agricultural household that both produces and consumes under price uncertainty at the time labor allocation decisions are made this paper demonstrates analytically that a non degenerate land distribution and price risk can together produce an inverse relationship even absent any of the more common explanations empirical evidence from madagascar confirms the plausibility of this intuitive explanation for the phenomenon

the future of small farms summary interest in agriculture for growth and poverty reduction reawakened in the early 2000s made all the keener by the sudden rise in cereals prices on world markets in 2007 08 but is it still possible to drive agricultural growth through small farms as happened in the green revolution whether small farms have a future was debated at a workshop held in wye united kingdom in june 2005 it concluded that small farm development is not just desirable for poverty reduction but also feasible even in changing circumstances and particularly those of more concentrated supply chains with more demanding buyers that said while much that needs to be done is straightforward such as provision of public goods fostering the institutional innovations to allow small farmers to deal with the emerging supply chains will require patient work tailored to specific circumstances the future of all smallholders may well not lie in farming but the measures to stimulate the rural nonfarm economy and provide jobs for those leaving farming a favorable rural investment climate provision of public goods institutional development are largely the same as those for agricultural development as well

strategies to increase agricultural productivity and reduce land degradation evidence from uganda this paper estimates a structural econometric model of household decisions regarding income strategies participation in programs and organisations crop choices land management and labour use and their implications for agricultural production and soil erosion based upon a survey of over 450 households and their farm plots in uganda many factors have context specific impacts and involve trade offs between increasing production and reducing land degradation government agricultural extension and training programs contribute to higher value of crop production in the lowlands but to soil erosion in the highlands by contrast non governmental organization ngo programs focusing on agriculture and environment help to reduce erosion but have less favourable impacts on production in the lowlands education increases household incomes but also reduces crop production in the lowlands poverty has mixed impacts on agricultural production depending on the nature of poverty smaller farms obtain higher crop production per hectare while households with fewer livestock have lower crop production population pressure contributes to agricultural intensification but also to erosion in the densely populated highlands several household income strategies contribute to increased value of crop production without significant impacts on soil erosion we find little evidence of impact of access to markets roads and credit land tenure or title on agricultural intensification and crop production and land degradation in general the results imply that the strategies to increase agricultural production and reduce land degradation must be location specific and that there are few win win opportunities to simultaneously increase production and reduce land degradation

buen vivir vs development ii the limits of neo extractivism like the entire andean region ecuador has an economic structure that is dependent on primary exports during the last boom in commodity prices the neo extractivist development strategy generated economic growth and simultaneously reduced inequality however this bonanza was not used to advance in economic diversification or for transition towards buen vivir sumak kawsay good living as postulated in the constitution and the national development plans we establish that neo extractivism is not compatible with buen vivir analysing three concrete aspects to this end the failure to fulfill the rights of nature and ecological sustainability the lack of advances in transforming the productive matrix insufficient results in matters of redistributive social policies

land distribution and international agricultural productivity the unequal distribution of agricultural land is often cited as a source of inefficiency in agriculture previous cross country studies of agricultural productivity differences though have not considered land inequality this article addresses this issue by using cross country data on inequality in operational holdings of agricultural land from deininger and squire 1998 in an estimation of an agricultural production function the gini coefficient for land holdings is found to have a significant negative relationship with productivity this is consistent with the existence of heterogeneity in productivity by farm size within countries a one standard deviation drop in the gini coefficient implies an increase in productivity of 8 5

african re agrarianization accumulation or pro poor agricultural growth recent signs of increasing agricultural production in a number of countries in sub saharan africa are by some commentators connected to local level differentiation this paper discusses such interpretations using household level longitudinal data from smallholder households in eight african countries for the period between 2002 and 2008 the use of a mixed methods social science approach complements traditional economic approaches through adding a spatial perspective pro poor agricultural growth so far is concentrated to particular villages where it is highly inclusive the policy challenge remains to devise strategies that can enhance growth also in marginal areas

experienced poverty and income poverty in mexico a subjective well being approach summary this paper uses a life satisfaction conception of well being to define experienced poverty based on a domains of life approach it shows that experienced poverty is a broader concept than income poverty and that they lead to substantial dissonance in the classification of persons as poor it is argued that experienced poverty better captures the complexity of being human it is shown that raising the income received by persons does not automatically translate into greater well being it states that public policy should be concerned not only about getting people out of income poverty but also about placing them in a life satisfying situation

level playing fields and laissez faire postliberal development strategy in inegalitarian agrarian economies focusing on the rural sector in latin america this paper explores the microeconomic linkages between distribution and growth which drive the possible reproduction of rural poverty over time the result of this exploration is a neostructuralist perspective which argues that actually existing laissez faire agrarian economies do not present a level playing field and that low wealth farms face disadvantages which tend to reproduce or even deepen sectoral inequality the paper then tries to identify the sorts of public policy and collective action which might modify the nature of growth and distribution in post liberalization agrarian market economy

behavioural and material determinants of production relations in agriculture in this essay we develop a framework for analysing the major institutions governing the production and exchange of output and the primary factors of production in rural areas the analysis incorporates general considerations of risk and information constraints jointly with the principal material attributes of agriculture and of agricultural production factors the framework is used to analyse barriers to the existence of the major intertemporal and factor markets it is applied specifically to land scarce environments for which it provides an internally consistent explanation for many of the well documented institutional features of such settings in addition the analysis provides new implications for among other phenomena the inter relationships among ownership holdings operational scale family size and factor productivity for the scarcity of animal rental markets and use of animals as collateral for the renting out of land by small landowners and for the existence of plantations for certain crops

is small beautiful farm size productivity and poverty in asian agriculture the debate on the relationship between farm size and productivity has gone through a complete circle in the 1960s it was perceived that small farms were efficient because they can fully use their resources particularly family labor and they can monitor their production activities closely but in the 1970s and 1980s as many asian countries rapidly moved towards industrialization and urbanization small farms were considered a major obstacle in this process

the inverse relationship between productivity and farm size a test using regional data from india the farm size productivity debate for india needs little introduction it has occupied a prominent position in the agricultural economics literature since 1962 when sen observed that indian farm management data revealed an inverse relationship between farm size and yields per acre since then no fewer than twenty journal papers have appeared on this subject sen 1975 the objective of this paper is to test two hypotheses that were either not given enough attention or left unresolved in the debate the first is that the inverse relationship is valid for all of indian agriculture it is not merely a phenomenon observed in a few sample villages this means a test of the hypothesis that the small farm sector as a whole is more productive than the large farm sector in indian agriculture the second hypothesis is that the inverse relationship is true only of a traditional agriculture and that it breaks down with technical progress a methodology is developed below which uses cross sectional regional data to test the two hypotheses simultaneously on applying this methodology to indian district level data 272 districts for 1970 71 it is found that the hypothesis of the small farm sector being more productive than the large farm sector cannot be rejected at low levels of agricultural technology but can be rejected at higher levels this suggests that the inverse relationship between yields and farm size although valid for a traditional agriculture cannot be assumed to exist in an agriculture experiencing technical change

explaining agricultural and agrarian policies in developing countries the paper describes and as far as possible explains variations in policies programs and institutions that influence agricultural growth agrarian relations and rural welfare across developing countries and over time it evaluates the impact of distorted policy patterns on agricultural production and rural poverty and identifies conditions under which policy reforms meant to bring about greater efficiency and equity are likely to be initiated and sustained it draws upon a broad range of literature to show how material conditions missing markets and government policies affect static welfare outcomes patterns of accumulation state formation and the establishment of political institutions it suggests ways to improve policy advice and proposes directions for future research

equilibrium credit rationing of small farm agriculture it is often argued that externally imposed contractual restrictions lead to inequitable credit rationing this paper argues that unrestricted laissez faire markets may also inequitably ration credit a formal model which grants borrowers autonomy in credit application and use demonstrates that adverse incentive and selection effects may cause banks to endogenously impose interest rate restrictions and ration small farms out of the credit market consequently liberalization of financial markets may be insufficient to guarantee small farms access to credit

new perspectives on farm size and productivity abstract the farm size and productivity debate has been limited by the focus on land or labor productivity generally showing respective productivity advantages to smaller or larger sized farms our purpose is to provide new perspectives on the debate by bringing together evidence from a set of novel case studies in both rich and poor countries common to them are the adoption of total factor productivity tfp as the comparative performance measure and the reliance on panels of farm micro data the present article presents a synthesis of findings from five case studies in i malawi tanzania and uganda ii bangladesh iii brazil iv australia and v the united states the preponderance of evidence from these studies suggests that there is no single economically optimal agrarian structure rather it appears to evolve with the stage of economic development certain farm sizes face relative productivity advantages such as small farms in africa but with economic and market growth that smallholder advantage will likely attenuate moving toward constant and eventually increasing returns to size yet importantly small farms may be quite dynamic and need not be a drag on agricultural growth until perhaps well into the development process

rural market imperfections and the farm size productivity relationship evidence from pakistan the subject of this article is the relationships between farm size and productivity and between farm size and profitability in the developing countries the recent controversies over the inverse size output relationship are reviewed and a framework is provided that explains the inverse relationship based on plausible assumptions about imperfections in the markets for labor land credit and risk from this framework a set of testable hypotheses are derived the hypotheses are tested on recent farm level panel data from pakistan a strong inverse relationship between farm size and yield is present in the sample even when household fixed effects are used to account for unobserved heterogeneity moreover the suggested market imperfections framework is consistent with the data

financial market efficiency in an agrarian economy microeconometric analysis of the pakistani punjab the shadow price of capital in production is a useful indicator of the efficacy of the rural financial system using data on participants and non participants in a small farm credit programme from the pakistani punjab this article estimates the shadow price of capital endogenous switching regressions techniques are employed to control for the likely heterogeneity of borrowers versus non borrowers results indicate that an individual selected at random from the population of small farmers would experience a 200 per cent rate of return on the first rupee borrowed from the small farm credit programme indicating a high shadow price of capital and a prima facie case for small farm credit programmes

the relation between farm size and farm productivity the role of family labor supervision and credit constraints abstract the paper shows that if the performance of hired farmhands is affected by supervision from family members and if the availability of credit is dependent on the amount of land owned then a systematic positive or negative relationship between per acre yields and farm size will prevail a model with no supervision effects on labor productivity would predict that yields are unaffected by farm size the paper also investigates the relation between land utilization and owned holding size when land rental possibilities are limited results are shown to be compatible with various observed patterns in ldcs