Abstract
Within many African households, agricultural production is simultaneously carried out on many plots controlled by different members of the household. Detailed plot-level agronomic data from Burkina Faso provides striking evidence of substantial inefficiencies in the allocation of factors of production across the plots controlled by different members of the household. Production function estimates imply that the value of household output could be increased by 10-15% by reallocating currently used factors of production across plots. This finding contradicts standard models of agricultural households. A richer model of behaviour, which recognizes that the individuals who comprise a household compete as well as co-operate, has important implications for the structure of agricultural production and for the design of agricultural policy.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 407-423 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | Food Policy |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 1995 |
Funding
The authors thank Steve Block, Peter Timmer and participants in the conference 'Getting Agriculture Moving in the 1990s', for comments on a preliminary version. C. Udry acknowledges financial support from the National Science Foundation. We are grateful to the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) for making the data available.
Keywords
- agricultural policy
- farm productivity
- gender differentials
- household efficiency
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Food Science
- Development
- Sociology and Political Science
- Economics and Econometrics
- Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
