The purpose of this study is to assess the potential of clustering in the development of agriculture and rural communities in China. We shall examine in detail the food industry, which is the link in the food chain that propels the industrialization of agriculture, and identify instances of...

Off-farm work accounts for a substantial and growing share of household income among smallholder farmers in most of Sub-Saharan Africa, but evidence on the effects of these earnings on farm investments remains sparse. We use panel data from a sample of smallholder farmers in Kenya to estimate...

The braconid larval parasitoid Cotesia flavipes Cameron was introduced from Asia into East and Southern African region starting in 1993 to control the invasive exotic maize stemborer Chilo partellus (Swinhoe) (Lepidoptera: Crambidae). A quasi-experiment was constructed using farmers that applied...

A non-neutral stochastic distance function model is used to examine whether output specialization has an impact on the economic performance of vegetable producers in Benin. Specialization is assumed to have an effect on the production frontier and on the distance to the production frontier...

This study develops and uses a programming model for farm-level resource use and output supply response to estimate the effects of agricultural land tax in South Africa: A case study of Free State, a region of extremely large commercial farms that gained their size and economic heft during the...

This paper analyzes the impact of Public Works (PW) from the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) in the agricultural regions of Ethiopia. In particular, based on a household model with two inputs, I explore the eects of the program on capital and labor decisions using the Ethiopian Rural...

The benefits from increased levels of social capital have been shown to manifest themselves in ways that can increase the efficiency of the use and regulation of natural resources, as well as increase the resiliency of resource dependent communities against fluctuations in abundance. While the...

This paper examines the effect of off-farm work on the economic performance of corn farms. It estimates returns to scale and technical efficiency following an input distance function approach and compares the relative performance of corn farm operator households with and without off-farm work....

This paper deals with the estimation of a random coefficient model. The virtue of this approach is that it considers firm heterogeneity, which conventional SFA models do not. When the model is applied to Polish farms, the results indicate that the conventional random and fixed effect models...

Seasonal wage labour was rarely distinguished from the permanent one in farm-household models although it has sharply increased in developed countries. Therefore, we propose to endogenize the demand for this peculiar labour type and highlight the trade-offs for the various labour combinations on...