Publication: Agricultural Productivity and Land Inequality: Evidence from the Philippines
Loading...
Published
2023-12-26
ISSN
0258-6770 (print)
1564-698X (online)
1564-698X (online)
Date
2024-05-03
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
How do agricultural productivity gains affect the distribution of agricultural land Exploiting three waves of census data from the Philippines covering 21 years and 17 million plots, this article finds that municipalities endowed with favorable soil and weather conditions for genetically modified (GM) corn cultivation experience a relative increase in landholding inequality. Agricultural land is decreasing during this period and this decrease is driven by a decline in the size of large farms. The introduction of GM corn slows down this process by keeping more land under cultivation, which contributes to the documented relative increase in inequality.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Bequet, Ludovic. 2023. Agricultural Productivity and Land Inequality: Evidence from the Philippines. World Bank Economic Review. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/41489 License: CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
World Bank Economic Review
1564-698X
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
No results found.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Relief from Usury(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-04)The impact of micro-credit interventions on existing credit markets is theoretically ambiguous. Previous empirical work suggests the entry of a joint-liability lender may lead to a positive impact on the informal lending rate. This paper presents the first randomized controlled trial–based evidence on this question. Households in rural Bihar, India, were offered low-cost credit through a government-led self-help group program, the rollout of which was randomized at the panchayat level. The intervention led to a dramatic 14.5 percent decline in the use of informal credit, as households substituted to lower-cost self-help group loans. Due to the program, the average rate paid on recent loans fell from 69 to 58 percent per year overall. Rates on informal loans also declined slightly. Among landless households, informal lending rates fell from 65.5 to 63.2 percent, decreasing by 40 percent the gap in rates paid by landless versus landowning households. Two years after the initiation of the program, significant positive impacts on asset ownership among landless households were apparent. Impacts on various indicators of women's empowerment were mixed, and showed no clear direction when aggregated, nor was there any impact on consumption expenditures.Publication Jobless Growth? Okun's Law in East Asia(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-08)Was economic growth in East Asia jobless? This paper addresses this question using data from eight East Asian countries during the period between 1997 and 2011 to estimate the Okun's Law Coefficient, which captures the relationship between growth and employment. The analysis suggests that growth was not jobless. However, there is considerable variation across countries. Generally, the effect of growth on employment tends to magnify under more flexible hiring and firing rules. Yet even where labor markets are more tightly regulated, economic growth affects employment, not necessarily in the aggregate but in its composition. There is evidence that agricultural employment moves counter-cyclically, as opposed to non-agricultural employment. The effect is particularly pronounced in periods of economic crisis, suggesting that agriculture may serve as a shock-absorber for workers laid off in the industrial sector. Isolating non-agricultural employment reveals a stronger relationship between growth and job creation.Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication Commodity Markets Outlook, April 2024(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-04-25)The conflict in the Middle East has been exerting upward pressures on prices of key commodities, notably oil and gold. High commodity prices, despite relatively subdued global GDP growth, suggest some countervailing forces offsetting tepid demand, such as heightened geopolitical strains and increasing metals-intensive investments in the energy transition. Commodity prices are forecast to soften marginally in 2024 and 2025 but remain substantially above pre-pandemic levels. Unlike most other prices, crude oil prices are expected to increase in 2024, mainly reflecting geopolitical tensions. The key risk to commodity price projections relates to the possibility of a broadening of the Middle East conflict, which could lead to significantly higher oil prices, thus reigniting global inflationary pressures. Meanwhile, food insecurity worsened markedly last year, reflecting elevated food prices and armed conflicts around the world. Should such conflicts worsen, global hunger could rise substantially. Heightened uncertainty around the commodity price outlook underscores the importance of forecast accuracy. A Special Focus section evaluates the performance of five approaches used to forecast prices of three commodities—aluminum, copper, and oil. It concludes that there is no “one-approach-beats-all.” Macroeconometric models tend to be more accurate at longer horizons, mainly due to their ability to account for the impact of structural changes. It is, however, critical to incorporate judgment and information that cannot be accounted for by statistical approaches. This highlights the importance of employing a wide range of approaches when forecasting commodity prices.Publication Farm Size and Productivity(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-06-28)This paper proposes a new interpretation of the farm size-productivity relationship. Using two rounds of the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey, and drawing on earlier work on five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, the paper shows that the relationship between farm size and productivity is neither monotonic nor univocal. Most previous studies that tested the inverse farm size-productivity relationship used ordinary least squares estimation, therefore reporting parameter estimates at the conditional mean of productivity. By expanding these important findings to consider the entire distribution of agricultural productivity, the analysis finds sign switches across the distribution, pointing to a “direct-inverse-direct” relationship. Less productive farmers exhibit an inverted U-shape relationship between land productivity and farm size, while more productive farmers show a U-shape relationship that reverses the relationship. In both cases, the relationship points toward a threshold value of farm size; however, the threshold is a minimum for the less productive farmers and a maximum for the more productive ones. To the left of the threshold, for very small farmers, the relationship between productivity and farm size is positive; for the range of middle farm size, the relationship is negative; and to the right of the threshold, the relationship is direct (positive) again. From a policy perspective, these findings imply that efficiency-enhancing and redistributive land reform should consider farm size in the proper context of the present and potential levels of agricultural productivity. The results and their policy implications underline the relevance of the most recent efforts of the international development community to collect more reliable georeferenced data on farm size and agricultural productivity.