Description

Dated: May 2019

Authors: IFAD , Douglas Gollin

This is a research paper from IFAD, which "considers the relationship between farm size and productivity. It begins by discussing measurement issues and conceptual issues related to agricultural productivity, including the well-documented difficulty of measuring inputs and outputs in smallholder production systems. The paper then considers the relationship between farm size and productivity, documenting patterns both across countries and within countries. Across countries, there is a weak but positive relationship between farm size and the value of agricultural output per unit of land (i.e. yield). A much stronger positive relationship holds for agricultural output per unit of labour, which is closely correlated with farm size across countries. Within countries, the relationship between farm size and yield is often negative (the widely documented “inverse farm size-productivity relationship). However, even within countries, there is typically a strong positive relationship between farm size and labour productivity. The paper concludes by considering the policy implications, if any, of the relationships between farm size and agricultural productivity."

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