Publication: The Gender Gap in Agricultural Productivity: The Role of Market Imperfections
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Published
2015-08-19
ISSN
0022-0388
Date
2015-09-28
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This paper hypothesises that labour and credit market imperfections – by discouraging off-farm income-generating activities and restricting access to inputs, respectively – affect female farm productivity more deeply than male productivity. The paper develops a theoretical model, which decomposes the contribution of various market imperfections to the gender productivity gap. Empirically we show that agricultural labour productivity is, on average, 44 per cent lower on female-headed plots than on those managed by male heads. 34 per cent of this gap is explained by differences in labour market access and 29 per cent by differences in credit access.
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Publication Market Imperfections Exacerbate the Gender Gap(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-06)This paper hypothesizes that labor and credit market imperfections—by discouraging off-farm income-generating activities and restricting access to inputs, respectively—affect female farm productivity more deeply than male productivity. The paper develops a theoretical model that decomposes the contribution of various market imperfections to the gender productivity gap. The paper shows empirically that agricultural labor productivity is on average 44 percent lower on plots managed by female heads of household than on those managed by male heads. Thirty-four percent of this gap is explained by differences in labor market access and 29 percent by differences in credit access.Publication Caught in a Productivity Trap: A Distributional Perspective on Gender Differences in Malawian Agriculture(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-03)In targeting poverty gains, sub-Saharan African governments have emphasized the alleviation of gender differences in agricultural productivity. The empirical studies on the gender gap, however, have frequently used data that were limited regarding geographic and topical coverage, and/or details on intra-household dynamics. The study provides a nationally-representative analysis of the gender gap in Malawi, and decomposes it, for the first time, at the mean and at selected points of the agricultural productivity distribution into (i) a portion driven by gender differences in levels of observable attributes (the endowment effect), and (ii) a portion driven by gender differences in returns to the same set of observables (the structure effect). Sequentially, the authors unpack the relative contributions of different factors towards the gender gap, and suggest future research priorities to inform policy interventions. The authors find that while female-managed plots are, on average, 25 percent less productive, 82 percent of this differential is explained by differences in endowments, mainly due to high-value crop cultivation and levels of household adult male labor inputs. The factors driving the structure effect include child dependency ratio and effectiveness of household adult male labor and inorganic fertilizer. The gender gap increases across the productivity distribution, ranging from 22 percent at the 10th percentile to 37 percent at the 90th percentile. While it is explained predominantly by the endowment effect in the first half of the distribution, the contribution of the structure effect towards the gender gap increases steadily above the median, standing at 34 percent at the 90th percentile.Publication Micro-Level Welfare Impacts of Agricultural Productivity(Taylor and Francis, 2018)This article analyses the micro-level welfare impacts of agricultural productivity using a two-wave nationally representative, panel data from rural Malawi. Welfare is measured by various dimensions of poverty and food insecurity; and agricultural productivity is measured by maize yield and value of crop output per hectare. The poverty measures included per capita consumption expenditure, relative deprivation in terms of per capita consumption expenditure, poverty gap and severity of poverty; and the measures of food insecurity included caloric intake and relative deprivation in terms of caloric intake. Depending on the measure of welfare, the impact of agricultural productivity was estimated with a household fixed effects estimator, a two-part estimator or a correlated-random effect ordered probit estimator. The results indicate that growth in agricultural productivity has the expected welfare-improving effect. In terms of economic magnitude, however, both the direct effect and economy-wide spillover effect (in the non-farm sector) of a percentage increase in agricultural productivity on the poverty and food security measures are small. Efforts to effectively improve the welfare of rural agricultural households should therefore go beyond merely increasing agricultural (land) productivity.Publication Caught in a Productivity Trap(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-09)The vast majority of households in Malawi are involved in agriculture, and improving agricultural productivity, particularly for women, who tend to attain lower yields than men, could lead to significant poverty reduction and improvements in gender equality. This study asks two main questions: (1) exactly how great are the differences in agricultural productivity between men and women in Malawi? And (2) how much of the gender gap is explained by differences in levels of agricultural inputs vs. differences in returns to these inputs? The author trace the varying constraints faced by farmers at different levels of productivity, as well as at average productivity, a level of analysis that is crucial for designing effective interventions aimed at bridging the gender gap. We find that on average, female-managed plots are 25 percent less productive than plots managed by males. Further, the gender gap widens significantly as agricultural productivity increases. More than 80 percent of the mean gender gap is explained by differences in levels of agricultural inputs, suggesting that addressing market and institutional failures underlying these differences could have direct economic benefits.Publication Are Women Less Productive Farmers?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-04)African governments and international development groups see boosting productivity on smallholder farms as key to reducing rural poverty and safeguarding the food security of farming and non-farming households. Prompting smallholder farmers to use more fertilizer has been a key tactic. Closing the productivity gap between male and female farmers has been another avenue toward achieving the same goal. The results in this paper suggest the two are related. Fertilizer use and maize yields among smallholder farmers in Uganda are increased by improved access to markets and extension services, and reduced by ex ante risk-mitigating production decisions. Standard ordinary least squares regression results indicate that gender matters as well; however, the measured productivity gap between male and female farmers disappears when gender is included in a list of determinants meant to capture the indirect effects of market and extension access.
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