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Author : Uris Lantz Caldo Baldos
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (14 download)
Download or read book Essays on productivity growth in agriculture written by Uris Lantz Caldo Baldos and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author : Keith Owen Fuglie
Publisher : CABI
ISBN 13 : 1845939212
Total Pages : 390 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (459 download)
Download or read book Productivity Growth in Agriculture written by Keith Owen Fuglie and published by CABI. This book was released on 2012 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is written primarily for agricultural economists doing research on productivity. It includes discussions of the theoretical underpinnings of productivity measurement as well as the many practical considerations that go into translating this theory into actual measures of aggregated outputs and inputs. The unifying concept of agricultural productivity used across the chapters of this volume is aggregate total factor productivity (TFP) of the sector. The volume also contains detailed analysis of the underlying causes of agricultural productivity growth. Part I (chapters 2-6) examines agricultural productivity in high-income and transition countries. Part II (chapters 7-11) examines agricultural productivity growth and its driving forces in five important agricultural producers in Asia and Latin America. Part III (chapters 12-14) focuses on measuring and identifying constraints to agricultural productivity growth in sub-Saharan Africa. Part IV (chapters 15-16) gives a global perspective on agricultural productivity.
Author : Sara Esfahani
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 170 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (13 download)
Download or read book Essays on Agricultural Productivity and Economic Development written by Sara Esfahani and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (936 download)
Download or read book Essays on Agricultural and Resource Economics written by and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation provides theoretical and empirical contributions to investigate the roles and sources of the technological innovation and the productivity growth via three essays. Employing the patent count and citation data over 1977-2011, the first chapter explores the determining factors of innovations of the U.S. biofuel. I confirm that the knowledge stocks existing in the industry and the crude oil price significantly affect the technological innovations of biofuel in U.S. The second chapter investigates the productivity growth in major dairy production regions in U.S. I show that the emerging dairy regions have relatively higher productivity than the traditional regions. Dynamic decomposition results indicate that surviving farms contribute more than entering and exiting farms. Farm and regional driving forces of farm productivity are also examined. The third chapter investigates landowners' decisions on the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) under a model of land uses. I develop a structural model to examine the manner in which agricultural productivity, market conditions, and CRP payment affect landowner's land use decisions. A novel identification strategy is employed to control for endogeneity of CRP payment and landowners' self-selection into the program. The parameter estimates are used to simulate the impact of increased agricultural prices and CRP payment on the program enrollment and costs.
Author : Federico J. Trindade
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781321946796
Total Pages : 124 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (467 download)
Download or read book Essays on Agricultural Productivity and the Environment written by Federico J. Trindade and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 1 analyzes trends in agricultural productivity growth in South America, a region that is likely to have a major role in fulfilling the increased future food demand, to investigate if the slowdown being observed in other regions is present in the subcontinent. Additionally, we study how the institutional, economical and sociological environment affects agricultural productivity.
Author : Will Martin
Publisher : World Bank Publications
ISBN 13 : 9090805303
Total Pages : 36 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (98 download)
Download or read book Productivity Growth and Convergence in Agriculture and Manufacturing written by Will Martin and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 1999 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The growth of agricultural productivity is widely believed to be low. But this study finds the productivity rate in agriculture to be higher than that in manufacturing, both on average and for groups of countries at different stages of development. This suggests that a large agricultural sector need not be a disadvantage for growth performance, and may be an advantage.
Author : Olabisi Aderonke Ekong
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (134 download)
Download or read book Essays on the Nexus of Climate Change, Agricultural Productivity, and the Environment written by Olabisi Aderonke Ekong and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agriculture is highly dependent on and sensitive to weather. Warming effects result from greenhouse gas emissions and aerosols from a small number of countries but its impact will be felt on a global scale. So far, agricultural productivity growth has sustained the continuous global supply of food but will this continue into the foreseeable future with the incidence of climate change? The effects of climate change on crop yields have been the focus of several studies. However, the sensitivity of agricultural productivity (measured as Total Factor Productivity-TFP) to climate change is not well understood. The first essay examines how historical changes in temperature and precipitation have affected the evolution of agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) while accounting for the short and long term impact. A fixed effect regression model for 128 countries for a period of 1961 to 2014 was employed to exploit yearly changes in temperature and precipitation as the identification strategy. Results show that precipitation has a significant effect on TFP growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, tropical and low income countries. Global short term temperature effect is offset in the long run showing that farmers adapt to reduce the effects of temperature in their behavioral decisions. Irrespective of the impact of climate change, there have been calls for an increase in agricultural productivity due to uncertainty and a global decline in Research and Development (R&D) expenditures. Previous literature accounts for the effect of global TFP growth on global food security and the environment. My second essay estimates the impact of TFP growth in different regions on global food security and the environment using a partial equilibrium model. To construct comparable TFP shocks across regions, I consider three TFP shock scenarios: (i) a uniform 100 percent increase in TFP growth in each region, (ii) TFP growth in each region that gives the same decrease in global commodity price, and (iii) TFP growth in each region resulting from the same increase in R&D expenditure. Results show that a 100% increase in TFP in the US & Canada increases agricultural carbon emission within the US & Canada by 16.9% but with a net global decrease in agricultural carbon emissions by 4.27%. In addition, a 100% increase in TFP in the US & Canada decreases global food security (malnutrition) by 13.09%. These results provide justification to support increasing R&D expenditures in developed regions. Overall, TFP growth is most effective in Sub-Saharan Africa as it gives the largest reductions in malnutrition and carbon emissions.
Author : Yaoji Lu
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 92 pages
Book Rating : 4.X/5 (3 download)
Download or read book Prospects for productivity growth in U.S. agriculture written by Yaoji Lu and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author : Junmin Liao
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 166 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (914 download)
Download or read book Essays on Structural Transformation, Productivity, and Development written by Junmin Liao and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation focuses on the macro determinants of economic transformation, and their impact on productivity. The first chapter analyzes the underlying mechanisms that explain the rise of the service sector in China. Along with China's unprecedented growth, the rapid expansion of its service sector is one of the fastest among emerging countries. However, the literature has yet to offer a clear understanding of such expansion. I show that distribution services first grow with the manufacturing sector, followed by personal services as per capita income rises. Motivated by this growth pattern, this chapter provides a theory that describes 1) the complementarity between distribution services and the manufacturing sector, and 2) the substitution between personal services and home production. Quantitative results show that the personal service sector is the key to account for the early and rapid rise of the service sector in China. High productivity growth and high capital intensity in the personal service sector, and labor market frictions are the most important channels. By revealing the growth pattern of the service sector in the early stages of development, the paper thereby contributes to the growing literature on the rising importance of the service economy. The second chapter studies the role of labor reallocation in explaining the increasingly high aggregate investment rate in China. I build a multi-sector general equilibrium model with non-homothetic preferences to establish a link between labor reallocation and the rising investment rate. As agricultural surplus labor move into the non-agricultural sector, which accumulates capital faster, capital return is sustained at a high level. The quantitative analysis supports that the massive labor reallocation from agriculture to non- agriculture accounts for a substantial portion of the high investment rate. The third chapter describes and quantifies the role of financial frictions in explaining agricultural productivity differences across regions. We construct PPP-adjusted sector-level data across provinces in China and find large agricultural and aggregate productivity differences between rich regions and poor regions. We then explore household-level survey data and find severe borrowing constraints in rural areas. Limited credit in poor areas depresses the use of intermediate inputs and hence encourages the use of labor input. As a consequence, workers in poor areas are kept in the agricultural sector and agricultural labor productivity remains low. We use a two-sector general equilibrium model featuring non-homothetic preferences, intermediate inputs and limited commitment to explain and quantify the importance of financial development in rural China. Our model predictions are broadly consistent with the empirical evidence from the literature. The quantitative analyses show that credit constraints account for a substantial part of agricultural employment share and labor productivity differences.
Author : Virgil Ball
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 1461508517
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (615 download)
Download or read book Agricultural Productivity written by Virgil Ball and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agricultural Productivity: Measurement and Sources of Growth addresses measurement issues and techniques in agricultural productivity analysis, applying those techniques to recently published data sets for American agriculture. The data sets are used to estimate and explain state level productivity and efficiency differences, and to test different approaches to productivity measurement. The rise in agricultural productivity is the single most important source of economic growth in the U.S. farm sector, and the rate of productivity growth is estimated to be higher in agriculture than in the non-farm sector. It is important to understand productivity sources and to measure its growth properly, including the effects of environmental externalities. Both the methods and the data can be accessed by economists at the state level to conduct analyses for their own states. In a sense, although not explicitly, the book provides a guide to using the productivity data available on the website of the U.S. Department of Agriculture/Economic Research Service. It should be of interest to a broad spectrum of professionals in academia, the government, and the private sector.
Author : Josephat Koima
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 201 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (386 download)
Download or read book Essays on Agricultural Productivity, Youth Employment, and Human Capital Investment in Sub-saharan Africa written by Josephat Koima and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation focuses on the intersection of agricultural productivity, youth employment, and investments in human capital development in Sub–Saharan Africa (SSA). Agriculture is a dominant employer and source of income in SSA, and plays an important role in youth employment and educational attainments.In Chapter 1, we study the role of structural transformation in the labor reallocation between the farm and the non–farm sector and the consequential impact on worker demographics. Specifically, we investigate whether agricultural productivity differentially reallocates labor by age and gender. We develop a theoretical model where increased land productivity leads to younger individuals sorting into the non–farm sector while older individuals sort into agriculture. We then use data from Zambia in our empirical analysis. Our main results show some evidence of productivity affecting labor reallocation within recent productivity lags (last 2 years) but not when longer productivity lags (4 or 6) are considered. Specifically, consistent with our model prediction, a 10% increase in a 2–year lagged moving average of productivity decreases the probability of farming by 0.3 percentage points among youth (15–24) and older youth (25–34). We also show that youth (15–24) also exit farming following increased productivity. Increased productivity tends to reduce the intensity of farming across all age groups but the reduction is relatively larger among the youth. In addition, young men are more likely to exit business activity as productivity increases relative to young women – across all productivity lags. In the short term (2–lags), while youth exit farming, there is no differential outcome between genders. However, among older youth, males are more likely to exit farming compared to women. Finally, males mainly drive the reduction in intensity of farming. Overall, while we find some evidence in favor of our hypotheses, the evidence is generally limited to the short term and the marginal effects are quantitatively small.Chapter 2 investigates the impact of agricultural productivity on human capital investments in Tanzania. Agriculture remains a major source of employment and income in Tanzania. Therefore, any agricultural productivity shocks are likely to affect educational investment decisions. Our results provide evidence that increased agricultural productivity boosts spending on uniform, contributions and total academic expenses. We find positive but statistically non–significant effects of productivity on study times. In addition, we find no evidence of heterogeneous effects by student gender. We show evidence that productivity effects are smaller in female–headed households. Finally, we find some evidence that post–primary students experience larger impacts compared to primary school students.In Chapter 3, I investigate the impact of primary school electrification on academic outcomes in Kenya. Between 2014 and 2016, the number of primary schools with electricity rose from 56% to 94%. Schools near the grid network were connected to grid electricity while those further received solar photovoltaics. Using this rapid electrification expansion as a source of identifying variation in a panel fixed effects model, the paper estimates the impact on school test scores, enrollment, and completion. The paper also attempts to quantify the effects of lighting on education performance by relying on the off–grid (solar) electricity coefficients. Using a universe of 8th grade students in public schools in Kenya, the paper finds no evidence that electricity affects test scores or enrollment in the short run. However, off–grid electrification increases completion by 1%. Using off–grid estimates, the paper concludes that lighting has a small positive impact on completion but not on test scores or enrollment.
Author : Manzamasso Hodjo
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (129 download)
Download or read book Essays on Agricultural Productivity and the Impact of Food Price Change on Welfare in Africa written by Manzamasso Hodjo and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Africa is the most food-insecure continent in the world, according to the World Bank and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. While low purchasing power is the main cause of food insecurity, inefficient domestic food production is also a major constraint. Our study specifically focused on four food production issues in Africa, namely, agricultural productivity, cropland use, food demand and welfare analysis, and demand-led crop breeding. First, we assessed the impact of public spending on agricultural productivity in Africa. We estimated the effect of two government-spending measures: Agriculture Budget Share (BS) and Research Share of Agricultural GDP (RS) on agriculture total factor productivity growth (TFPG). We used a panel fixed-effect estimator to control for the country-specific characteristics of twenty-eight African economies from 1991-2012. Although North African economies appeared to have the highest TFPG, this did not translate into the highest agricultural and research budget share. Meanwhile, Central African economies exhibited the lowest BS and RS, along with the lowest TFPG of the continent. The panel fixed-effect estimator revealed a marginal impact of 6.77% for RS on TFPG after seven years. However, the cumulative marginal impact of BS on TFPG is estimated at 7.21% over the eight years that follow the budget increment. Our findings suggest that a BS of 14% and a RS of 15% are required for a country to double its TFPG in the eight following years. Therefore, additional, and continuous investment in research and development is required for a significant productivity enhancement, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. Second, we assessed the factors that shape cereal cropland allocation decisions in Nigeria and Niger. We theoretically derived the key cropland allocation arguments using the household model. Next, we used the World Bank LSMS-ISA data to map acreage mean centers and fit a fractional regression model using the panel fixed-effect estimator. We assessed the traditional Mendelsohn land use model and uncovered its limitation in efficiently approximating cereal cropland allocation. We improved the appropriateness of fit of the traditional Mendelsohn model by controlling for additional factors, such as food prices, socio-demographics, and food trade factors. Overall, we found cereal acreage shares in Nigeria and Niger to be spatially heterogeneous and determined by climatic, price, and trade factors. Additionally, farmers tend to base their cropland allocation decisions upon the price of the most important staples: maize in Nigeria; millet and sorghum in Niger. Furthermore, due to their tolerance to heat and drought, sorghum and millet compete for northeast farmland in both countries, especially for rainfed croplands. Thus, our study illustrates that millet and sorghum are key choices in ensuring food security in the context of global warming and rainfall instability. Our findings fill a literature void and provide policy makers with evidence to foster geo-referenced farmer cooperatives aimed at enhancing food production. Furthermore, our findings could be incorporated into a land use framework for planning, environmental monitoring, scenario analysis, and impact assessment. The third essay analyzed the staple foods consumption patterns of households in Niger by estimating a complete demand system. Demand elasticities are estimated using the Niger 2011 and 2014 LSMS-ISA household survey data to fit the modified Linear AIDS model. The results indicated that food consumption patterns in the country are affected by income and prices, as well as by socio-economic and geographic factors. All food items have positive expenditure elasticities and negative own-price elasticities, with rice exhibiting the most elastic demand. We found millet to be a necessity while rice and sorghum are luxuries. Additionally, our analysis revealed that urban households had a more diversified staple demand pattern. Furthermore, the welfare analysis revealed that an increase of millet price reduces rural welfare more than an increase in sorghum price. On the other hand, a sorghum price increase adversely affects the welfare of urban households the most. For example, a 20% increase of the millet or sorghum price reduces the average household welfare by 5.88% and 4.38%, respectively. This study highlights the importance of estimating staple food demand elasticities for both research and policymaking during a food price shocks. Our findings revealed that millet price is the canal that might foster support programs targeting the poorest households in Niger. Our fourth and last essay is a theoretical argument for demand-led breeding in a small-scaled farming system. Our investigation stems from the fact that agricultural productivity lags in small-scaled farming in Sub-Saharan Africa. While inadequate production capital, water control and poor infrastructure remain important challenges, the low adoption of improved and high-yielding varieties is a key limiting factor for productivity enhancement. Often, studies elucidating improved technology implementation are focused upon the adoption (demand) rather than the creation (supply). In this analytical essay, we reviewed theoretical causes and solutions to low varietal uptake for sorghum. Consistent with much of the structural research framework, we presented asymmetric information, bounded rationality, and weak intellectual property as key causes of seed market coordination failure. Leaning on the technology adoption under uncertainty model, we showed how market-induced uncertainty, compounded with other factors, reduces farmers' willingness to trade traditional seeds for improved ones. Furthermore, we used the matching theory, supported with a general equilibrium model, to show how consumer preference drives farm-level adoption. We argued that breeding programs can benefit from effective preference matching across the food value chain while leveraging on the growing demand-led breeding literature. Finally, we presented hypotheses that can be empirically used to assess stakeholders' weigh and ranking of varietal attributes across the food value chain.
Author : CHAORAN. CHEN
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (133 download)
Download or read book Essays on Macroeconomic Development written by CHAORAN. CHEN and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agricultural productivity is important for understanding international income differences. The international labor productivity differences are much larger in agriculture than in non-agriculture. Moreover, poor countries have higher agricultural employment shares. Therefore, my thesis studies why cross-country labor productivity differences are much larger in agriculture. In the first chapter, I argue that the prevalence of untitled land in poor countries lowers their agricultural productivity. Since untitled land cannot be traded across farmers, it creates land misallocation and distorts individuals' occupational choice between farming and working outside agriculture. I build a model to quantify the impact of untitled land. I find that economies with higher percentages of untitled land would have lower agricultural productivity; land titling can increase agricultural productivity by up to 82.5%. The second chapter studies agricultural productivity through technology adoption. Cross-country differences in capital intensity are larger in agriculture than in non-agriculture, reflecting differences in agricultural technology adoption. I build a model featuring technology adoption in agriculture. As the economy develops, farmers gradually replace the traditional technology with a modern technology which has higher capital intensity and higher productivity, as is observed in the U.S. historical data. For countries at different stages of development, my model can explain 1.56-fold more of agricultural productivity differences compared to a model without technology adoption. I further show that land misallocation in agriculture impedes technology adoption and magnify productivity differences. The third chapter, co-authored with Diego Restuccia and Raul Santaeulalia-Llopis, uses detailed household-level micro data from Ethiopia to study factor misallocation and its impact on agricultural productivity. We find substantial factor misallocation across farmers in agriculture. An efficient reallocation of resources can increase aggregate agricultural output and productivity by 127 percent. Land rentals substantially improve resource allocation, with market-based rentals much more effective in reducing misallocation. Exploiting regional variation in land rentals resulting from the implementation of a land certification reform, we find that more land rentals are associated with lower misallocation and higher agricultural productivity: a one percentage point higher land rental is associated with a 0.8 percentage points higher agricultural productivity.
Author : Aziza Kibonge
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781303049774
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (497 download)
Download or read book Essays on Agricultural Productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa written by Aziza Kibonge and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agriculture is the predominant sector in many of SSA (Sub-Saharan Africa) countries, capable of enhancing the economic development process while reducing poverty. However, the performance of this sector in SSA has been low compared to other developing countries, characterized by fluctuations over the decades. This study looks at the evolution of total factor productivity (TFP) growth rates, technical change and efficiency change in 41 countries in SSA, from 1960 to 2006. It also examines the potential role of institutions and political variables, climatic factors and water scarcity, as well as CO2 emissions from deforestation. The first chapter examines the association between agricultural productivity rates and institutions. The results show an annual growth in TFP of 0.6% with technical change playing a major role in determining TFP. Variables such as colonial heritage and years of independence are shown to contribute in explaining the gap in countries performance. The second chapter provides a better understanding of the role of climatic factors (precipitation, irrigation, drought and temperature) on total agricultural productivity rates. The effect of water is explicitly incorporated in productivity measurements using an indicator of drought developed from the standard precipitation index. Results suggest that agricultural productivity is sensitive to climate variability; Precipitation and temperature have a positive effect on agricultural production. Once drought and irrigation are accounted for, the gap in countries performance decreases and increases respectively. The third chapter is an attempt to "correct" TFP measurement in SSA's agriculture for CO2 produced as a result of land clearing needed in agriculture. The results suggest that (i) when CO2 is a joint output of the sector using an output distance function, TFP growth rates are higher as the same amount of inputs are used to produce two outputs instead of one; (ii) When CO2 emissions due to land clearing are treated as an input using a production function, it is effectively treated as a 'bad' output, and punishes the sector with lower TFP growth rates..
Author : Eric S. Owusu
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (133 download)
Download or read book Three Essays on Agricultural Productivity and Resource Utilization written by Eric S. Owusu and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Productivity differentials across gender and sowing dates in smallholder systems have been of interest to development policy, and I revisit the subjects in the context of groundnut, an important food and cash legume in Malawi. Using cross-sectional data, I address bias from observables through matching and production technology differences through recent stochastic meta-frontier (SMF) techniques. I deal with unobservable bias associated with choice of sowing date through the application of the selectivity-corrected stochastic frontier (SC-SPF) model. Also, owing to increasing pressure on water resources and the need to save irrigation water, I exploit a rich county panel of input-output census data, irrigation withdrawals, and climatic and soil factors to examine irrigation water productivity across time and space in the United States (U.S.). An irrigation productivity index (IPI) is calculated based on technology parameters generated with a novel panel stochastic production frontier (SPF) estimator. The results reveal different production technologies in use by male and female managers, and among farmers who sow early and late. Significant gender-related technology and managerial gaps translate into significant male advantages in land and total factor productivities (TFP). In addition, application of both the SC-SPF and SMF frameworks is supported, and early sowing leads to larger gains in output, while that group of farmers also exhibits higher managerial performance. Moreover, the results show that irrigation water productivity exhibits considerable variation across time and space and is driven by input deepening in the Corn Belt and Great Lakes, as well as the Plains, regions of the U.S. The national growth rate of irrigation water productivity has been rising since 2007, although growth has slowed in the past five years. Policy-wise, closing the productivity gap will require expanding female production possibilities through use of improved inputs and practices and enhancing managerial skills and know-how through extension. The findings provide clear support for early sowing as an attractive option that could be incorporated into extension delivery for smallholders. Increasing the growth of irrigation water productivity in the U.S. will require bridging the East-West productivity gap through increasing input deepening, especially in the U.S. West.
Author : Melanie Seama O'Gorman
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780494394755
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (947 download)
Download or read book Accounting for Disparity written by Melanie Seama O'Gorman and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three essays which focus on accounting for the sources of economic inequality in various contexts. The first two essays focus on disparity of agricultural labour productivity across the developing countries, while the third analyzes racial earnings inequality. The main goal of these essays is to shed light on some of the mechanisms which have generated these types of inequality, in order to better design policies for ameliorating them. The first essay is empirical, while the second and third essays construct general equilibrium models so as to quantitatively assess the importance of proposed sources of inequality. The first essay finds that a large proportion of the variation of the level and growth of agricultural labour productivity across a sample of developing countries can be explained by variation in input use across countries. I demonstrate that our understanding of disparity of labour productivity in developing country agriculture can be significantly improved by accounting for variation in the adoption of high-yielding seed varieties and for correlation between input use and technological change across countries. The second essay analyzes the factors which have contributed to agricultural stagnation in Sub-Saharan Africa, despite productivity improvements in agriculture in other developing regions. I construct a quantitative model which can match average Sub-Saharan African trends of agricultural labour productivity, crop yields and input use from 1965 to 2000. The model points to key factors which have constrained agricultural productivity growth over this period, and to the need for diverse yet concerted policies to arrest this stagnation. The third essay presents a quantitative model which sheds light on racial earnings inequality in the U.S., South Africa and Brazil. This model indicates that a large proportion of the racial wage gap in these three countries can be attributed to differential human capital accumulation by race. Most notably, distortions created by the explicit, racially-biased education system which existed in South Africa during Apartheid can explain roughly three quarters of the racial wage gap in South Africa in the early 1990's.
Author : Paul A. David
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521098755
Total Pages : 350 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (987 download)
Download or read book Technical Choice Innovation and Economic Growth written by Paul A. David and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1975-02-28 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monograph on historical experiences of technological change, Innovation and economic growth in the USA and the UK during the 1800's - covers agricultural mechanization, industrial development and infrastructure change, etc. Bibliography pp. 315 to 324, graphs, references and statistical tables.
