Resource information
In Africa, most development strategies
include efforts to improve the productivity of staple crops
grown on smallholder farms. An underlying premise is that
small farms are productive in the African context and that
smallholders do not forgo economies of scale -- a premise
supported by the often observed phenomenon that staple
cereal yields decline as the scale of production increases.
This paper explores a research design conundrum that
encourages researchers who study the relationship between
productivity and scale to use surveys with a narrow
geographic reach, when policy would be better served with
studies based on wide and heterogeneous settings. Using a
model of endogenous technology choice, the authors explore
the relationship between maize yields and scale using
alternative data. Since rich descriptions of the decision
environments that farmers face are needed to identify the
applied technologies that generate the data, improvements in
the location specificity of the data should reduce the
likelihood of identification errors and biased estimates.
However, the analysis finds that the inverse productivity
hypothesis holds up well across a broad platform of data,
despite obvious shortcomings with some components. It also
finds surprising consistency in the estimated scale elasticities.
