Is There a Farm Size–Productivity Relationship in African Agriculture? Evidence from Rwanda

By D. Ali, K. Deininger. Land Economics, 2014

221 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Whether the negative relationship between farm size and crop productivity that is confirmed in a large global literature holds in Africa is of considerable policy relevance. Plot-level data from Rwanda point toward constant returns to scale and a strong negative relationship between farm size and crop output per hectare that is robust across specifications and emerges also if profits with family labor valued at shadow wages are used but disappears if family labor is valued at market rates. In Rwanda, labor market imperfections, rather than other unobserved factors, seem to be a key reason for the inverse farm-size productivity relationship. (JEL O13, Q15)

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/57eb2d5c7ee31093c256bee87fbf5db9821389cb

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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

K. Fuglie

In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

In Soil Science

Citations in the corpus

Harvesting Prosperity: Technology and Productivity Growth in Agriculture (2019, background): “Ali and Deininger (2015) show, for example, that in Rwanda smaller farms devoted a greater share of their land to growing high-value and nutrient-dense vegetables, fruits, and root crops, compared to larger farms that devoted more land to grains.”
Assessing the impacts of land fragmentation and plot size on yields and costs: A translog production model and cost function approach (2018, background): “Under these circumstances, land fragmentation could reduce both land and labor productivity, thus affecting agricultural production (Ali and Deininger, 2014; Barrett et al., 2010; Deininger et al., 2012; Jia and Martin, 2014; Kalantari and Abdollahzadeh, 2008; Schultz, 1953; Tan et al., 2010).”
The Effect of Land Access on Youth Employment and Migration Decisions: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia (2018, unknown): “2014; Sheahan and Barrett 2014; Ali and Deininger 2015), labor-saving technologies may substitute for youth farm labor (Bustos, Caprettini, and Ponticelli 2016). Pessimistic views on inheritance prospects may encourage youth to transition from low-return agricultural to high-return non-agricultural ”
Revisiting the Farm Size‐Productivity Relationship Based on a Relatively Wide Range of Farm Sizes: Evidence from Kenya (2019, unknown): “Our analysis is based on the neo-classical production function approach following earlier studies (Feder 1985; Assunç~ao and Braido 2007; Barrett, Bellemare, and Hou 2010; Ali and Deininger 2015).”
Land productivity and plot size : is measurement error driving the inverse relationship ? (2017, unknown): “This relationship, observed in many Sub-Saharan African countries, states that smaller plots are more productive than larger plots, even within a farm household (Ali and Deininger, 2015; Assunção and Braido, 2007; Barrett et al., 2010).”