at the end of the season.<sup>28</sup> Despite these differences in Malawi at the end of the season, which are investigated further below, there is an encouraging degree of correspondence between the activity-level estimates in Table 1 and the product-level estimates in Table 3, both in levels and in trends.<sup>29</sup> This is reassuring and suggests that farmers understood the questions about the intended use of their output broadly in the way they were intended, i.e. they assessed whether their combined products, on average, are more likely to be sold or to be used for family consumption.

**Table 3: Share of farmers producing only or mainly for sale – product level**

||G<br>|hana (4 district<br>|s)<br>|M<br>|alawi (2 distric<br>|ts)<br>|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
||Male|Female|Total|Male|Female|Total|
|Start-of-season|0.80|0.78|0.79|0.22|0.23|0.22|
||(0.01)|(0.02)|(0.01)|(0.03)|(0.03)|(0.02)|
|N|726|605|1331|174|204|378|
|End-of-season||||0.75|0.55***|0.64|
|||||(0.03)|(0.04)|(0.03)|
|N||||172|205|377|

_Notes:_ Standard errors in parentheses; * denotes the male-female difference is significant at 10%. ** at 5%. *** at 1%. Based on the Ghana and Malawi Agricultural Labor Surveys.

The large increase over time in the share of farmers producing only or mainly for sale in Malawi calls for further investigation. Table 4 examines the proximate factors that may explain this increase, i.e. changes in the crops/animals that household members were working during the reference week vs. an increase in the share of each crop/animal intended for sale, by showing start- and end-of-season descriptive statistics for the subsample of household members engaged in farming at both points in time.

The results show that the main driver of changes over time are the products that these household members were working on (Table 4, upper panel): there is much less time spent in the last seven days on the cultivation of crops at the end of the season, especially of maize, which is largely intended for own use (79 percent at the start of the season vs 7 percent at the end of the season). Conversely, there is _more_ livestock activity at the end of the agricultural season; this includes rearing of goats, which are mainly

> 28 Mechanically, the estimates for Ghana will show fewer male-female differences than the estimates for Malawi. This is because in Ghana, one respondent in the household was asked about the intended use of output of all the crops produced by the household, whereas in Malawi each individual working in agriculture could report on the intended use of output of each product s/he produces (thus allowing for intra-household variation). Moreover, the product-level estimates in Ghana do not consider livestock products, only crops.

> 29 There is also a degree of correspondence when the analysis is done at the individual level. For all adults with both activity level and crop level status available (N=1077), 64.5% produce for sale according to both, and 7.7% produce for own use according to both. For 27.8% of adults, the two measures do NOT correspond (roughly equally divided between the two off-diagonal cells in the transition matrix). The numbers are similar for men and women.

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