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Author: Tan, Zhibo
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 44
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Book Description
Facing scarcity of a production factor, a firm can develop technologies to either substitute the scarce factor (price effect) or complement the more abundant factors (market size effect). Whether the market size effect or the price effect dominates largely depends on the elasticity of substitution among factors according to the theory of directed technical change. However, it is a great challenge to empirically test the theory because factor prices are often endogenously determined. In this paper, we use imbalanced sex ratios across Chinese provinces as a source of identification strategy to test how female labor scarcity affects corporate innovation based on the matched dataset of annual surveys of industrial firms in China and the national patent database. In regions with a large male population, female-intensive industries face more serious problems finding female workers than their male-intensive counterparts. We find that such female shortages have spurred firms in female-intensive industries to innovate more. The pattern is much more evident in industries with low substitution between female and male workers than in those with high substitution, consistent with the predictions of directed technical change theory.
Author: Tan, Zhibo
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 44
Get Book Here
Book Description
Facing scarcity of a production factor, a firm can develop technologies to either substitute the scarce factor (price effect) or complement the more abundant factors (market size effect). Whether the market size effect or the price effect dominates largely depends on the elasticity of substitution among factors according to the theory of directed technical change. However, it is a great challenge to empirically test the theory because factor prices are often endogenously determined. In this paper, we use imbalanced sex ratios across Chinese provinces as a source of identification strategy to test how female labor scarcity affects corporate innovation based on the matched dataset of annual surveys of industrial firms in China and the national patent database. In regions with a large male population, female-intensive industries face more serious problems finding female workers than their male-intensive counterparts. We find that such female shortages have spurred firms in female-intensive industries to innovate more. The pattern is much more evident in industries with low substitution between female and male workers than in those with high substitution, consistent with the predictions of directed technical change theory.
Author: Johnson, Michael E.
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 52
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Book Description
The primary goal of the study is to investigate the potential to expand oilseeds, specifically soybeans,as an alternative commercialcrop to tobacco among Malawian farmers. A principal motivation for undertaking the study at the microeconomic level is to determine, in a theoretically consistent fashion, the type of policy and economic environment under which farmers begin to shift more of their scarce resources to oilseed production.The study aims to provide recommendations to a growing demand among policy makers and development partners for a greater diversification of exports and crop production systems of the majority smallholder farmers in Malawi. Using representative farm models, the study examinesthe potential for expanding production of soybeans among typical smallholder farming systems in Malawi. The results will help guide future policies and investments targeted at promoting greater crop diversification and incomes, in order to reduce poverty and malnutrition in Malawi. Given the amount of labor and land resources allocated to maize production for food security purposes, we also consider the policy challenges that emerge for crop diversification as a result
Author: Wang, Xu
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 32
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Book Description
Although both infrastructure and innovation play an important role in fostering a country’s economic growth, discussion in the literature about how the two are connected is limited. This paper examines the impact of road density on firm innovation in China using a matched patent database at the firm level and road information at the city level. Regional variation in the difficulty of constructing roads is used as an instrumental variable to address the potential endogeneity problem of the road variable. The empirical results show that a 10 percent improvement in road density increases the average number of approved patents per firm by 0.71 percent. Road development spurs innovation by enlarging market size and facilitating knowledge spillover.
Author: Benin, Samuel
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 56
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Book Description
This paper uses panel data on 46 African countries from 2001 to 2014 to estimate the impacts of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), an agriculture-led integrated framework of development priorities in Africa, on agricultural expenditure and productivity, income, and nutrition. A difference-in-difference treatment-effects model (based on when a CAADP compact is signed and the level of CAADP implementation reached) and different estimation methods and model specifications are used. The results show that CAADP has had a positive impact on agricultural value-added and land and labor productivity. The impact on agriculture expenditure is generally negative, suggesting that there is a substitution effect between the government’s own funding and external sources of funding for the sector. The estimated impact on income and nutrition is generally insignificant. There are some puzzling results from the interaction between specific period of compact signing and level of implementation reached. Implications for maintaining the positive impacts, as well as for further research to understand the puzzling results, are discussed.
Author: Rodrigues, Joao
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 32
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Book Description
There is growing interest within the climate change and development community in using seasonal forecast information to reduce the losses to agriculture resulting from climate variability, especially within food-insecure countries. However, forecast systems are expensive to establish and maintain, and therefore gauging the potential economic return to investments in forecast systems is crucial. Most studies that evaluate seasonal forecasts focus on developed countries and/or overlook agriculture’s economywide linkages. Yet forecasts may be more valuable in developing regions such as East Africa, where climate is variable and agriculture has macroeconomic importance. We use computable general equilibrium and process-based crop models to estimate the potential economywide value of national seasonal forecast systems in Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Zambia. Stochastic seasonal simulations produce value distributions for forecasts of varying accuracy and varying levels of farm coverage. A timely and accurate forecast adopted by all farmers generates average regional income gains of US$113 million per year. Gains are much higher during extreme climate events and are generally pro-poor. The forecast value falls when forecast skill and farm coverage decline. National economic and trading structures, including the importance of agricultural exports, are found to be major determinants of forecast value. Economywide approaches are therefore needed to complement farm-level analysis when evaluating forecast systems in low-income agrarian economies.
Author: Ashour, Maha
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 40
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Book Description
Adoption of productivity- and income-enhancing agricultural technologies is conspicuously low in Africa south of the Sahara. Farmers’ beliefs regarding the authenticity of agricultural inputs are important for explaining technology adoption: if farmers do not believe that inputs are genuine, they are unlikely to invest in them. The degree of alignment between beliefs about and actual counterfeiting can help explain both the social costs of the “lemons” problem, and low rates of adoption. This is the first paper to explore whether farmer beliefs regarding counterfeiting align with actual rates of counterfeiting, and we do so across a very large geographic area serving tens of thousands of farmers in Uganda using a more precise measure of counterfeiting than many previous studies. We examine the relationship between beliefs and counterfeiting using quantitative measures of farmer beliefs regarding the authenticity of herbicide in their local market as well as a large random sample of laboratory-tested herbicide samples to measure counterfeiting rates in local markets. We report evidence of considerable counterfeiting of herbicides in local markets, with nearly one in three bottles containing less than 75 percent of the labeled concentration of active ingredient. We find evidence that farmers’ beliefs regarding the extent of counterfeiting of herbicide are significantly associated with measures of the actual prevalence of counterfeiting in local markets. These results indicate that farmers are at least partly informed about the “market for lemons” problem in local input markets. However, the results also suggest that although better informed farmers imply a lower social cost of counterfeiting, the high rate of counterfeiting and the relative accuracy of farmer information contributes to low adoption of agricultural inputs in Africa.
Author: Wouterse, Fleur Stephanie
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 28
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Book Description
Niger is a landlocked Sahelian country, two-thirds of which is in the Sahara desert. Although only one-eighth of the land considered arable, more than 90 percent of Niger’s labor force is employed in agriculture, which is predominantly subsistence oriented. Food security remains a major challenge in rural areas of Niger, and gender is a significant basis for the inequality among household members with respect to access to land. Access to land, which is a measure of the income-earning potential of an individual, is an important determinant of the distribution of bargaining power within the household. Because households may not act in a unitary manner when making decisions, the power of individuals within the household to exert their own preferences may determine welfare outcomes, such as spending on nutritious foods or healthcare. In this paper, we use new data for Niger and regression analyses to assess the importance of the intrahousehold distribution of power for the behavior of rural households. Our results reveal that men are significantly more empowered than women in rural households in Niger and that social protection programs such as water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) and food-for-training contribute significantly to the empowerment of women. Our findings also point to the validity of the collective approach to modeling household behavior, as the distribution of power was shown to affect household behavior. In particular, we found that an increase in power in favor of the adult female significantly increases expenditures on healthcare and reduces spending on vices (cigarettes and alcohol).
Author: Laborde Debucquet, David
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 58
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Book Description
Over the past 25 years, economic growth rates in many developing countries have outpaced those in industrialized countries, and per capita incomes of these two groups of countries have started to converge. Growth in developing countries contributed to a dramatic drop—from 37 percent to 13 percent—in the global extreme poverty rate between 1990 and 201. However, the global economic outlook has deteriorated recently. This paper examines the impact of the actual and projected slowdown in the world economy since 2012 on the poor and on the potential for achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It builds on the changes between 2012 and late 2015 in the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook projections to provide the basic slowdown scenario. It then uses a global model to assess the impacts of lower rates of productivity growth and consequent lower savings and investment on key price and income variables. The productivity shocks are passed directly to the production activities included in household microsimulation models for almost 300,000 households. These households are also affected by the modeled changes in prices and wages. Simulations allow us to assess the impacts of the slowdown on the real household incomes of the poor, and hence on the poverty rate. The results suggest that the poorest countries will see the greatest slowdown in poverty reduction, with over 5 percent of their population projected to remain below the poverty line. Overall 38 million fewer people will leave extreme poverty compared to earlier projections. Farm households are at particular risk in middle-income countries, with over 1.5 percent more of the farming population potentially not escaping extreme poverty in these countries. By 2030, average extreme poverty in rural areas is now projected to be about 7.5 percent, rather than 7.1 percent. While substantial poverty reduction is still expected between now and 2030, a strong focus on policies for poverty reduction will be vital to achieving the first SDG goal of eliminating poverty.
Author: Khan, Md. Tajuddin
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 32
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Book Description
This study measures the willingness of male and female farmers to pay for climate-smart technology in rice. Rice is the most important crop in India in terms ofarea, production,and consumption. It is also the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions among all crops. Direct-seeded rice (DSR)with drum seeder, a climate-smart technology, requires less labor and water and is more climate friendly than transplanted rice; yet,its adoption is slow in India. Theauthors of this studycarried out a discrete choice experiment with 666 farmers from the Palghar and Thane districts of Maharashtra to measure their willingness to pay for drum seeders—a key piece of equipment for adopting DSR. Both male and female farmers were surveyed to capture the heterogeneity in their valuation of the key attributes of drumseeders. Although both male and female farmers prefer cheaper drum seeders, the marginal valuation of different attributes of the drum seeder varies by the farmers’ gender. The authors also used the Women Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), to collect self-reported data on the role and say of women in agriculture. The respective gender roles in the family and on the farm seem to explain some of this difference. Men have a greater say over how the family spends the cash. Accordingly, men tend to have a higher willingness to pay for attributes that increase income (increase in yield) or reduce cash costs (reduction in the seedrate). Women contribute a large share of the labor for transplanting rice, much of whichis unpaid work on family farms. Not surprisingly, therefore, women seem to value labor saving significantly more than their male counterparts. Further, theWEAI data show that although men in the family have more say, women do have an influence on decisions regarding crop production and the adoption of new technologies,to an extent. Therefore, to enhance the adoption of drum seeders, the product designers and extension workers should also target women
Author: Kumar, Anjani
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 52
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Book Description
Food safety is the most vital component of food security. One option to ensure food safety is through enhancing compliance at the farm level. This study investigates the status, estimates the cost, identifies the determinants, and assesses the impact of compliance with food safety measures in milk production in Nepal. The study is based on cross-section primary data collected at the farm level from six districts of Nepal. These districts are known for milk production and capture the geographical and institutional diversity of milk production in the country. The study shows that the status of compliance with food safety measures at the dairy farm level is not very encouraging. The intensity with which food safety practices are adopted shows wide inter- and intra-district variations. This intensity depicts a positive relationship to herd size. The additional cost of compliance with food milk safety measures reveals an inverse relationship with herd size. The factors associated with the adoption of food safety measures are caste, number of children and elderly people in a family, household labor size, herd size, access to information, inspection for conformity with the safety and quality standards in dairy farming, perception of households about food safety assistance provided by milk buyers, and market outlet types. We also provide evidence of the impact of food safety measures on farm-gate prices and farmers’ profitability.
