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.
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