How Does Population Density Influence Agricultural Intensification and Productivity

By Anna Josephson, Jacob Ricker-Gilbert, R. J. Florax. 2014

156 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study uses household-level panel data on smallholder farmers in Ethiopia to estimate how rural population density (RPD) affects agricultural intensification and productivity. Our results suggest that higher RPD is associated with smaller farm sizes, and has a positive effect on input demand, represented by increased fertilizer use per hectare. Overall, increased input use does not lead to a corresponding increase in staple crop yields, and thus farm income declines as population density increases. This suggests a situation where farmers in areas of high RPD may be stuck in place, unable to sustainably intensify in the face of rising RPD and declining farm sizes. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Safety Research, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/19c92281cb7542ecf6d5ea4217f96071cab10123

Citations in the corpus

• Measurement Error Mechanisms Matter: Agricultural Intensification with Farmer Misperceptions and Misreporting (2019, unknown): “…inputs, consistent with the Boserupian hypothesis and with many previous studies (Pender and Gebremedhin, 2007; Headey, Dereje and Taffesse, 2014; Josephson et al., 2014; Ricker-Gilbert, Jumbe and Chamberlin, 2014; Sheahan and Barrett, 2017).21 Intensification parameters range from -0.4 to -0.8…”