IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/ragrxx/v58y2019i2p180-199.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Revisiting farm size-productivity relationship: New empirical evidence from Ethiopia

Author

Listed:
  • Solomon Bizuayehu Wassie
  • Gashaw Tadesse Abate
  • Tanguy Bernard

Abstract

Are small farms more productive? With this question in mind, this study revisits the farm size–productivity relationship and explores potential explanations using a unique plot-level data from predominantly wheat producers in Ethiopia. Overall, we find that small plots are more productive than large plots. We next test the conventional explanations hypothesised in the literature – labour market imperfection related to costly monitoring of hired workers and omitted variable bias related to soil quality – and find that neither of them essentially explains the inverse relationship. More importantly, we account for agricultural intensification and found no relationship between plot size and productivity. This suggests that the inverse relationship posited in the literature could simply arise from neglecting the impact of agricultural intensification.

Suggested Citation

  • Solomon Bizuayehu Wassie & Gashaw Tadesse Abate & Tanguy Bernard, 2019. "Revisiting farm size-productivity relationship: New empirical evidence from Ethiopia," Agrekon, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 58(2), pages 180-199, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:ragrxx:v:58:y:2019:i:2:p:180-199
    DOI: 10.1080/03031853.2019.1586554
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03031853.2019.1586554
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/03031853.2019.1586554?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Kwabena Nyarko Addai & Wencong Lu & Omphile Temoso, 2021. "Are Female Rice Farmers Less Productive than Male Farmers? Micro-evidence from Ghana," The European Journal of Development Research, Palgrave Macmillan;European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), vol. 33(6), pages 1997-2039, December.
    2. Lowder, Sarah K. & Sánchez, Marco V. & Bertini, Raffaele, 2021. "Which farms feed the world and has farmland become more concentrated?," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 142(C).

    More about this item

    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:taf:ragrxx:v:58:y:2019:i:2:p:180-199. 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: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/ragr20 .

    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.