Sources of agricultural productivity growth and stagnation in sub-Saharan Africa

Frisvold, George B.; Ingram, Kevin

doi:10.1016/0169-5150(95)01143-9

Cited by 40 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…A 1% increase in farm size would decrease output by 0.29 %. These findings are in line with Frisvold and Ingram (1994) who found that for small fields the production is normally small, but in terms of productivity or production per hectare they perform better than larger plots.…”

Section: Research In Applied Economicssupporting

confidence: 81%

Economic Efficiency of Maize Production in Swaziland: The Case of Hhohho, Manzini and Shiselweni Regions

Sihlongonyane

Masuku

Belete³

2014

RAE

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The study used a sample of 188 maize farmers to determine the economic efficiency of maize production in Swaziland. Descriptive statistics, Cobb-Douglas production function and Tobit regression were used to analyse the data. The results indicated technical efficiency of 64.7% suggesting that farmers could still improve the technical efficiency by 35.3%. While, allocative efficiency was 99.52%, suggesting that farmers were able to use minimum costs to get a given level of output. In terms of economic efficiency, farmers were 64.3% efficient. They were able to use minimum inputs and at minimum costs for a given level of output. However, farmers could still increase their economic efficiency by 35.7%. Technical Efficiency was affected by formal education (p<0.01), and household size (p<0.10, while Allocative efficiency was affected by formal education (p<0.10) and gender (p<0.05). Economic efficiency was affected by household size (p<0.10). The study has shown that maize farmers were relatively economically efficient; hence the null hypotheses (1. Maize farmers are technically inefficient, 2. Maize farmers are allocatively inefficient) were rejected in favour of the alternative. However famers can still improve economic efficiency by improving their technical efficiency. The study recommends that farmers should improve their technical efficiency by increasing productivity, and increasing amount of fertilizer applied per ha. There is a need for government to subsidize inputs for farmers and to continue with subsidizing the tractor hire services.

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Section: Research In Applied Economicssupporting

confidence: 81%

Economic Efficiency of Maize Production in Swaziland: The Case of Hhohho, Manzini and Shiselweni Regions

Sihlongonyane

Masuku

Belete³

2014

RAE

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“…However, these findings are contrary to the ones of some newer studies applying more sophisticated econometric methods which either did not include education variables at all in the model (e.g. Frisvold and Ingram 1995), or found insignificant (Vollrath 2007) or even puzzling negative coefficients for the education variables used (Craig et al 1997). Hence, the literature so far can be judged as rather inconclusive about the role of education for agricultural productivity in the international context.…”

Section: Introductioncontrasting

confidence: 54%

Revisiting the Role of Education for Agricultural Productivity

Reimers

Klasen

2013

American J Agri Economics

113

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractWhile the majority of micro studies finds that rural education increases agricultural productivity, various recent cross-country regressions analyzing the determinants of agricultural productivity were only able to detect an insignificant or even surprisingly negative effect of schooling. In this paper, we show that this failure to find a positive impact of education in the international context appears to be a data problem related to the inappropriate use of enrolment and literacy indicators. Using a panel of 95 developing and middle-income countries from 1961 to 2002 that includes data on educational attainment, we show that education indeed has a highly significant, positive effect on agricultural productivity which is robust to the use of different control variables, databases and econometric methods. Distinguishing between different levels of education further reveals that only primary and secondary schooling attainment has a significant positive impact while the effect of tertiary education is insignificant. When distinguishing between income groups, our results indicate that even though the coefficient of the education variable is highly significant and positive for all quintiles, the returns to education are higher for the countries belonging to the richest three quintiles. This finding can be interpreted as support for the claim that education will have larger impacts on agricultural productivity in the presence of rapid technical change since it helps farmers to adjust more readily to the new opportunities provided by technological innovations.

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“…The implication is that any increase in the farm size would reduce the returns to be realized from the sales of mushrooms, so an extra cost in inputs does not translate into better returns. These findings are similar to those of Frisvold and Ingram (1994) who found that for small fields the production is normally small, but in terms of productivity they perform better than larger plots. Notes: ** = significant at 1% level, *=significant at 5% level It is evident from the study that the estimates for lambda and sigma squared in the study area ISSN 2327-0640 2018 are 0.0123 and 0.1508 respectively and lambda is statistically significant at 1%, indicating a good fitness and correctness of the specified distribution assumption.…”

Section: Technical Efficiency Of Mushroom Farmerssupporting

confidence: 81%

Technical Efficiency of Mushroom Farmers in Swaziland

Dlamini¹,

Masuku²,

Rugambisa³

2017

JAB

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Mushrooms have been cultivated in Swaziland since 2001 as part of a long-term programme which sought to improve rural livelihoods through commercial production of non-conventional high-value commodities. Despite the mushroom enterprise gaining popularity in a number of Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, where production is dominated by rural-based small-scale farmers, limited research has been done to study the technical efficiency of mushroom farmers in Swaziland.The primary objectives of this study were to determine the level of technical efficiency of mushroom farmers in Swaziland and identify factors which influence technical efficiency of mushroom farmers. Measures of technical efficiency were conducted with 62 farmers in the four Agro ecological zones of Swaziland. The list of current mushroom farmers was obtained from the Mushroom ISSN 2327-0640 2018 http://jab.macrothink.org 2 Development Unit in Malkerns. The Stochastic frontier production function was used to compute the level of technical efficiency (TE). The results revealed that the mean technical efficiency was 95%. The results suggest that substantial gains in output can be attained by improving present technical practices which includes the increase in the amount of substrate used. A two limit Tobit regression technique was used to examine the relationship between TE and various farm and farmer characteristics. The results showed that household size was significant at 5% level, technical assistance was also significant at 5% and access to credit was significant at 10% level. It was recommended that extension officers equip farmers on technologies that will help boost their efficiency level and policies that will make access to credit from government and NGO's for mushroom farmers to acquire resources. Journal of Applied Biotechnology

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Sources of agricultural productivity growth and stagnation in sub-Saharan Africa

Cited by 40 publications

References 30 publications

Economic Efficiency of Maize Production in Swaziland: The Case of Hhohho, Manzini and Shiselweni Regions

Economic Efficiency of Maize Production in Swaziland: The Case of Hhohho, Manzini and Shiselweni Regions

Revisiting the Role of Education for Agricultural Productivity

Technical Efficiency of Mushroom Farmers in Swaziland

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