Agricultural Extension and Imperfect Supervision in Contract Farming: Evidence from Madagascar

Bellemare, Marc F. (2010): Agricultural Extension and Imperfect Supervision in Contract Farming: Evidence from Madagascar. Forthcoming in: Agricultural Economics

Abstract

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 �rm 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 speci�c 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.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Supervision, Extension, Contract Farming, Grower-Processor Contracts
• Subjects: O - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth > O1 - Economic Development > O13 - Agriculture ; Natural Resources ; Energy ; Environment ; Other Primary Products; L - Industrial Organization > L2 - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior > L24 - Contracting Out ; Joint Ventures ; Technology Licensing; Q - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics ; Environmental and Ecological Economics > Q1 - Agriculture > Q12 - Micro Analysis of Farm Firms, Farm Households, and Farm Input Markets; O - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth > O1 - Economic Development > O14 - Industrialization ; Manufacturing and Service Industries ; Choice of Technology

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