Too Small to Be Beautiful? : The Farm Size and Productivity Relationship in Bangladesh

Gautam, Madhur ; Ahmed, Mansur

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: RURAL LIVELIHOOD;    TOTAL FACTOR PRODUCTIVITY;    FARM SIZE;    POVERTY;    AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-8387
RP-ID  :  WPS8387

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

This paper examines the agriculturalproductivity–farm size relationship in the context ofBangladesh. Features of Bangladesh's agriculture helpovercome several limitations in testing the inverse farmsize–productivity relationship in other developing countrysettings. A stochastic production frontier model is appliedusing data from three rounds of a household panel survey toestimate simultaneously the production frontier and thetechnical inefficiency functions. The “correlated randomeffects” approach is used to control for unobservedheterogeneous household effects. Methodologically, theresults suggest that the stochastic production frontiermodels that ignore the inefficiency function are likelymis-specified, and may result in misleading conclusions onthe farm size–productivity relationship. Empirically, thefindings confirm that the farm size and productivityrelationship is negative, but with the inverse relationshipdiminishing over time. Total factor productivity growth,driven by technical change, is found to have been robustacross the sample. Across farm size groups, the relativelylarger farmers experienced faster technical change, whichhelped them to catch up and narrow the productivity gap withthe smaller farmers.