IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/koe/wpaper/2102.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Changing Relationship between Farm Size and Productivity and Its Implications for Philippine Agriculture

Author

Listed:
  • Keijiro Otsuka

    (Graduate School of Economics, Kobe University
    Graduate School of Economics, Kobe University)

Abstract

No controversy in the history of agricultural economics is more perennial than the relationship between farm size and productivity. While the dominant view has been the inverse relationship (IR), particularly when the productivity is measured by gross value of output or physical yield per hectare, several studies found the positive and U-shaped relationships between farm size and productivity. Furthermore, there is evidence that IR has been weakened, particularly in rapidly-growing countries in Asia. This study's primary purpose is to identify causes for the different and changing relationships between farm size and productivity based on a literature review. The second purpose of this study is to review farm size changes over time among selected Asian countries to examine how farm size changes are related to the changing farm size-productivity relationship or the changing advantage of small vs. large farms. The third purpose is to draw policy implications of the changing farm size-productivity relationships for the future of Philippine agriculture.

Suggested Citation

  • Keijiro Otsuka, 2021. "Changing Relationship between Farm Size and Productivity and Its Implications for Philippine Agriculture," Discussion Papers 2102, Graduate School of Economics, Kobe University.
    • Handle: RePEc:koe:wpaper:2102
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.econ.kobe-u.ac.jp/RePEc/koe/wpaper/2021/2102.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Tasso Adamopoulos & Diego Restuccia, 2014. "The Size Distribution of Farms and International Productivity Differences," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(6), pages 1667-1697, June.
    2. Moya, Piedad & Kajisa, Kei & Barker, Randolph & Mohanty, Samarendu & Gascon, Fe & San Valentin, Mary Rose, 2015. "Changes in Rice Farming in the Philippines: Insights from five decades of a household-level survey," IRRI Books, International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), number 281801.
    3. Gucheng Li & Zhongchao Feng & Liangzhi You & Lixia Fan, 2013. "Re-examining the inverse relationship between farm size and efficiency," China Agricultural Economic Review, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 5(4), pages 473-488, November.
    4. Otsuka, Keijiro, 1991. "Determinants and consequences of land reform implementation in the Philippines," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(2), pages 339-355, April.
    5. Milu Muyanga & T S Jayne, 2019. "Revisiting the Farm Size-Productivity Relationship Based on a Relatively Wide Range of Farm Sizes: Evidence from Kenya," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 101(4), pages 1140-1163.
    6. Jikun Huang & Jiping Ding, 2016. "Institutional innovation and policy support to facilitate small-scale farming transformation in China," Agricultural Economics, International Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 47(S1), pages 227-237, November.
    7. Mataia, Alice B. & Beltran, Jesusa C. & Manalili, Rowena G. & Catudan, Betzaida M. & Francisco, Nefriend M. & Flores, Adrielle C., 2020. "Rice Value Chain Analysis in the Philippines: Value Addition, Constraints, and Upgrading Strategies," Asian Journal of Agriculture and Development, Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA), vol. 17(2), December.
    8. Barrett, Christopher B. & Bellemare, Marc F. & Hou, Janet Y., 2010. "Reconsidering Conventional Explanations of the Inverse Productivity-Size Relationship," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 38(1), pages 88-97, January.
    9. Adriano, Lourdes S., 1991. "A General Assessment of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program," Working Papers WP 1991-13, Philippine Institute for Development Studies.
    10. Jeffrey D. Michler & Gerald E. Shively, 2015. "Land Tenure, Tenure Security and Farm Efficiency: Panel Evidence from the Philippines," Journal of Agricultural Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 66(1), pages 155-169, February.
    11. Klaus Deininger & Songqing Jin & Yanyan Liu & Sudhir K. Singh, 2018. "Can Labor-Market Imperfections Explain Changes in the Inverse Farm Size–Productivity Relationship? Longitudinal Evidence from Rural India," Land Economics, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 94(2), pages 239-258.
    12. Benjamin, Dwayne, 1995. "Can unobserved land quality explain the inverse productivity relationship?," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 46(1), pages 51-84, February.
    13. Wang, Xiaobing & Yamauchi, Futoshi & Otsuka, Keijiro & Huang, Jikun, 2016. "Wage Growth, Landholding, and Mechanization in Chinese Agriculture," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 86(C), pages 30-45.
    14. Carletto, Calogero & Savastano, Sara & Zezza, Alberto, 2013. "Fact or artifact: The impact of measurement errors on the farm size–productivity relationship," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 103(C), pages 254-261.
    15. Gautam, Madhur & Ahmed, Mansur, 2019. "Too small to be beautiful? The farm size and productivity relationship in Bangladesh," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 84(C), pages 165-175.
    16. Alice Mataia & Jesusa Beltran & Rowena Manalili & Betzaida Catudan & Nefriend Francisco & Adrielle Flores, 2020. "Rice Value Chain Analysis in the Philippines: Value Addition, Constraints, and Upgrading Strategies," Asian Journal of Agriculture and Development, Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA), vol. 17(2), pages 19-42, December.
    17. Kentaro Kawasaki, 2010. "The costs and benefits of land fragmentation of rice farms in Japan ," Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, vol. 54(4), pages 509-526, October.
    18. Michael Kevane, 1996. "Agrarian Structure and Agricultural Practice: Typology and Application to Western Sudan," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 78(1), pages 236-245.
    19. Rada, Nicholas E. & Fuglie, Keith O., 2019. "New perspectives on farm size and productivity," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 84(C), pages 147-152.
    20. Keijiro Otsuka & Yanyan Liu & Futoshi Yamauchi, 2013. "Factor Endowments, Wage Growth, and Changing Food Self-Sufficiency: Evidence from Country-Level Panel Data," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 95(5), pages 1252-1258.
    21. Otsuka, Keijiro & Chuma, Hiroyuki & Hayami, Yujiro, 1992. "Land and Labor Contracts in Agrarian Economies: Theories and Facts," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 30(4), pages 1965-2018, December.
    22. Desiere, Sam & Jolliffe, Dean, 2018. "Land productivity and plot size: Is measurement error driving the inverse relationship?," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 130(C), pages 84-98.
    23. Donald F. Larson & Keijiro Otsuka & Tomoya Matsumoto & Talip Kilic, 2014. "Should African rural development strategies depend on smallholder farms? An exploration of the inverse-productivity hypothesis," Agricultural Economics, International Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 45(3), pages 355-367, May.
    24. Yu Sheng & Jiping Ding & Jikun Huang, 2019. "The Relationship between Farm Size and Productivity in Agriculture: Evidence from Maize Production in Northern China," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 101(3), pages 790-806.
    25. Otsuka, Keijiro, ed. & Fan, Shenggen, ed., 2021. "Agricultural development: New perspectives in a changing world: Synopsis," IFPRI synopses 9780896293854, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
    26. Jianying Wang & Kevin Z. Chen & Sunipa Das Gupta & Zuhui Huang, 2015. "Is small still beautiful? A comparative study of rice farm size and productivity in China and India," China Agricultural Economic Review, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 7(3), pages 484-509, September.
    27. Estudillo, Jonna P & Otsuka, Keijiro, 1999. "Green Revolution, Human Capital, and Off-Farm Employment: Changing," Economic Development and Cultural Change, University of Chicago Press, vol. 47(3), pages 497-523, April.
    28. Lowder, Sarah K. & Skoet, Jakob & Raney, Terri, 2016. "The Number, Size, and Distribution of Farms, Smallholder Farms, and Family Farms Worldwide," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 87(C), pages 16-29.
    29. Otsuka, Keijiro, ed. & Fan, Shenggen, ed., 2021. "Agricultural development: New perspectives in a changing world," IFPRI books, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), number 9780896293830.
    30. Yamauchi, Futoshi, 2016. "Rising real wages, mechanization and growing advantage of large farms: Evidence from Indonesia," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 62-69.
    31. Nguyen, Huy Quynh & Warr, Peter, 2020. "Land consolidation as technical change: Economic impacts in rural Vietnam," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 127(C).
    32. Collier, Paul & Dercon, Stefan, 2014. "African Agriculture in 50Years: Smallholders in a Rapidly Changing World?," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 63(C), pages 92-101.
    33. Heltberg, Rasmus, 1998. "Rural market imperfections and the farm size-- productivity relationship: Evidence from Pakistan," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 26(10), pages 1807-1826, October.
    34. Feder, Gershon, 1985. "The relation between farm size and farm productivity : The role of family labor, supervision and credit constraints," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 18(2-3), pages 297-313, August.
    35. Liu, Yanyan & Barrett, Christopher B. & Pham, Trinh & Violette, William, 2020. "The intertemporal evolution of agriculture and labor over a rapid structural transformation: Lessons from Vietnam," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 94(C).
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Keijiro Otsuka, 2021. "Strategy for Transforming Indonesian Agriculture," Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 57(3), pages 321-341, September.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Ayala Wineman & Thomas S. Jayne, 2021. "Factor Market Activity and the Inverse Farm Size-Productivity Relationship in Tanzania," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 57(3), pages 443-464, March.
    2. Ateka, Josiah & Onono-Okelo, Perez Ayieko & Etyang, Martin, 2021. "Does the inverse farm size productivity hypothesis hold for perennial monocrop systems in developing countries? Evidence from Kenya," African Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, African Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 16(3), September.
    3. Rada, Nicholas E. & Fuglie, Keith O., 2019. "New perspectives on farm size and productivity," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 84(C), pages 147-152.
    4. Chiarella, Cristina & Meyfroidt, Patrick & Abeygunawardane, Dilini & Conforti, Piero, 2023. "Balancing the trade-offs between land productivity, labor productivity and labor intensity," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 52(10), pages 1618-1634.
    5. Aragón, Fernando M. & Restuccia, Diego & Rud, Juan Pablo, 2022. "Are small farms really more productive than large farms?," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 106(C).
    6. Fang Xia & Lingling Hou & Songqing Jin & Dongqing Li, 2020. "Land size and productivity in the livestock sector: evidence from pastoral areas in China," Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, vol. 64(3), pages 867-888, July.
    7. Meilin Ma & Jessie Lin & Richard J. Sexton, 2022. "The Transition from Small to Large Farms in Developing Economies: A Welfare Analysis," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 104(1), pages 111-133, January.
    8. Omotilewa, Oluwatoba J. & Jayne, T.S. & Muyanga, Milu & Aromolaran, Adebayo B. & Liverpool-Tasie, Lenis Saweda O. & Awokuse, Titus, 2021. "A revisit of farm size and productivity: Empirical evidence from a wide range of farm sizes in Nigeria," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 146(C).
    9. Desiere, Sam & Jolliffe, Dean, 2018. "Land productivity and plot size: Is measurement error driving the inverse relationship?," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 130(C), pages 84-98.
    10. Gourlay, Sydney & Kilic, Talip & Lobell, David B., 2019. "A new spin on an old debate: Errors in farmer-reported production and their implications for inverse scale - Productivity relationship in Uganda," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 141(C).
    11. C. S. C. Sekhar & Namrata Thapa, 2023. "Rural market imperfections in India: Revisiting old debates with new evidence," Development Policy Review, Overseas Development Institute, vol. 41(5), September.
    12. Xingguang Li & Xuexi Huo, 2022. "Agricultural labor markets and the inverse plot size–productivity relationship: Evidence from China's apple growers," Review of Development Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 26(4), pages 2163-2183, November.
    13. 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).
    14. Keijiro Otsuka, 2014. "Viability of small-scale farms in Asia," Chapters, in: Raghbendra Jha & Raghav Gaiha & Anil B. Deolalikar (ed.), Handbook on Food, chapter 18, pages 462-481, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    15. Ali, Daniel Ayalew & Deininger, Klaus, 2014. "Is there a farm-size productivity relationship in African agriculture ? evidence from Rwanda," Policy Research Working Paper Series 6770, The World Bank.
    16. Steven Helfand & Matthew Taylor, 2018. "The Inverse Relationship between Farm Size and Productivity: Refocusing the Debate," Working Papers 201811, University of California at Riverside, Department of Economics.
    17. Helfand, Steven M. & Taylor, Matthew P.H., 2021. "The inverse relationship between farm size and productivity: Refocusing the debate," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 99(C).
    18. Taylor, Matthew P.H. & Helfand, Steven M., 2021. "The Farm Size – Productivity Relationship in the Wake of Market Reform: An Analysis of Mexican Family Farms," 2021 Conference, August 17-31, 2021, Virtual 315138, International Association of Agricultural Economists.
    19. Bevis, Leah EM. & Barrett, Christopher B., 2020. "Close to the edge: High productivity at plot peripheries and the inverse size-productivity relationship," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 143(C).
    20. Hailemariam Ayalew & Jordan Chamberlin & Carol Newman & Kibrom A. Abay & Frederic Kosmowski & Tesfaye Sida, 2024. "Revisiting the size–productivity relationship with imperfect measures of production and plot size," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 106(2), pages 595-619, March.

    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:koe:wpaper:2102. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Kimiaki Shirahama (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/fekobjp.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.