KNOWLEDGE BASE RESOURCE

Agricultural extension and imperfect supervision in contract farming: Evidence from Madagascar

Published by: John Wiley & Sons

Authored by: Bellemare, Marc F.

Publication Date: January 1, 2010

This article tests whether agricultural extension and imperfect supervision-conflated here into the number of visits by a technical assistant-increase productivity in a sample of contract farming arrangements between a processing firm and small agricultural producers in Madagascar. Production functions are estimated which treat the number of visits by a technical assistant as an input and which exploit the variation in the number of visits between the contracted crops grown on a given plot by a specific grower, thereby accounting for district-, grower-, and plot-level unobserved heterogeneity. Results indicate that the elasticity of yield with respect to the number of visits lies between 1.3 and 1.7. © 2010 International Association of Agricultural Economists.


Research Detail
Agricultural extension and imperfect supervision in contract farming: Evidence from Madagascar
Published by: John Wiley & Sons
Authored by: Bellemare, Marc F.
Journal Name: Agricultural Economics
Publication Date: Jan 1st, 2010