Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/red/sed017/716.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Heterogeneity, Measurement and Misallocation in African Agriculture

Author

Listed:
  • Christopher Udry

    (Yale University)

  • Douglas Gollin

    (University of Oxford)

Abstract
Empirical analysis of farm-level data from African agriculture consistently shows enormous dispersion in measured total factor productivity (TFP) at the farm level. Some farmers achieve relatively high levels of TFP, but many farms appear to operate at very low levels of measured TFP. One possible explanation for this is that some farmers have low levels of skill but continue nevertheless to farm because of market failures or distortions that make it difficult for them to be bought out by more skillful farmers. Previous research has suggested that this kind of misallocation may be an important source of differences in agricultural productivity across countries – and thus an important explanation for cross-country differences in per capita income. This paper notes that misallocation can be difficult to distinguish empirically from a range of measurement errors, classical and non-classical. It can also be difficult to measure productivity well in a highly volatile production environment. Finally, differences in farmer quality can be observationally similar to heterogeneity in unobserved land quality. Our paper presents a theoretical framework and empirical results that seek to advance our understanding of the distinctions between heterogeneity, measurement error, and misallocation in African agriculture, using data from three African countries. We use within-farmer variation in factor shares and productivity across plots to disentangle measurement error, land productivity variation and transitory shocks from misallocation as sources of dispersion in factor allocation, output and TFP. Preliminary results suggest that both measurement error and unobserved heterogeneity in land quality can account for a large amount of the measured differences in farm productivity, and these results also imply that misallocation has a relatively modest impact on output.

Suggested Citation

  • Christopher Udry & Douglas Gollin, 2017. "Heterogeneity, Measurement and Misallocation in African Agriculture," 2017 Meeting Papers 716, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    • Handle: RePEc:red:sed017:716
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2017/paper_716.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Chaoran Chen & Diego Restuccia & Raul Santaeulalia-Llopis, 2022. "The Effects of Land Markets on Resource Allocation and Agricultural Productivity," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 45, pages 41-54, July.
    2. Kibrom A. Abay, 2020. "Measurement errors in agricultural data and their implications on marginal returns to modern agricultural inputs," Agricultural Economics, International Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 51(3), pages 323-341, May.
    3. Amalavoyal Chari & Elaine M Liu & Shing-Yi Wang & Yongxiang Wang, 2021. "Property Rights, Land Misallocation, and Agricultural Efficiency in China [Misallocation, Selection and Productivity: A Quantitative Analysis with Panel Data from China]," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 88(4), pages 1831-1862.
    4. Gottlieb, Charles & Grobovšek, Jan, 2019. "Communal land and agricultural productivity," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 138(C), pages 135-152.
    5. Porzio, Tommaso & Rossi, Federico & Santangelo, Gabriella, 2020. "The Human Side of Structural Transformation," CEPR Discussion Papers 15110, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    6. Holden, Stein T., 2018. "The Economics of Fertilizer Subsidies," CLTS Working Papers 9/18, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Centre for Land Tenure Studies, revised 16 Oct 2019.
    7. Riley, Emma, 2018. "Mobile money and risk sharing against village shocks," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 135(C), pages 43-58.
    8. Doss, Cheryl R. & Catanzarite, Zachary & Baah-Boateng, William & Swaminathan, Hema & Diana Deere, Carmen & Boakye-Yiadom, Louis & Suchitra, J.Y., 2018. "Do men and women estimate property values differently?," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 107(C), pages 75-86.
    9. Porzio, T. & Santangelo, G., 2019. "Does Schooling Cause Structural Transformation?," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 1925, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    10. Porzio, Tommaso & Santangelo, Gabriella, 2017. "Structural Change and the Supply of Agricultural Workers," CEPR Discussion Papers 12495, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    11. Chen, Minjie & Heerink, Nico & Zhu, Xueqin & Feng, Shuyi, 2021. "Do Small Farm Sizes Imply Large Resource Misallocation? Evidence from Wheat-Maize Double Cropping Farms in the North China Plain," 2021 Conference, August 17-31, 2021, Virtual 315141, International Association of Agricultural Economists.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:red:sed017:716. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christian Zimmermann (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sedddea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.