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Author: Kwadwo Asenso-Okyere Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst ISBN: 0896295427 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 36
Book Description
Provides an overview of current knowledge of the impact of health issues on farm-level productivity and decisionmaking, and the impact of agriculture on health in developing countries.
Author: Kwadwo Asenso-Okyere Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst ISBN: 0896295427 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 36
Book Description
Provides an overview of current knowledge of the impact of health issues on farm-level productivity and decisionmaking, and the impact of agriculture on health in developing countries.
Author: Alexandra Estvan Hill Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
Ongoing shortages of agricultural workers have increased concerns about long-run sustainability for many U.S. producers. Particularly for producers of labor-intensive crops, employers are worried that labor shortages will lead to unharvested fields, lower outputs, and falling profits. Employers, policy makers, and academics can benefit from understanding factors that affect worker productivity, output quality, and worker labor supply. In my dissertation, I examine the effects of a minimum wage increase on worker productivity, the link between a worker's speed and the quality of output produced, and the determinants of intensive-margin labor supply. As a whole, my dissertation sheds light on behavioral responses to incentives in the workplace and shows how these responses can cause inefficiencies in federal, state, and employer policies. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I study how minimum wages and piece rate wages can interact to affect worker productivity. In the United States, minimum wage laws set a lower bound on earnings of piece rate workers. In agriculture, piece rates and productivity levels often result in minimum wages acting as a binding earnings floor. I develop a simple theoretical framework to demonstrate how an increase in this binding wage floor can cause workers to reduce effort and thus decrease productivity. I give empirical evidence of this prediction using the payroll records of strawberry harvesters on a large farm in Northern California. Using a fixed effects model, I estimate the productivity change of the average worker in response to increases in an employer-set base wage. Results support the theoretical predictions and indicate that a three percent increase in the wage floor causes the average worker to decrease productivity by seven percent. In the second chapter, I use the same data on worker productivity to explore the relationship between a worker's speed and the quality of the output she delivers. The link between speed and quality is of direct financial interest to employers and contributes to the understanding of effects from productivity-enhancing policies in the workplace. Using a naive OLS regression, I find a negative and significant relationship between speed and quality. I then separate speed into a worker's average seasonal speed and within-day shocks to her speed. I find that the link between speed and quality is driven by shocks to speed, rather than a worker's average speed. In particular, I find that when a worker works ten percent faster than her average, the quality of her output, measured as the percent of strawberries delivered without any defects, is 0.4 percentage points lower. In light of the strong correlation between speed shocks and quality, I use an IV approach to elicit causal estimates of the effect of speed on quality through exogenous shocks to speed. I find that a ten percent increase in a worker's speed, induced by an increase in the piece rate, causes the quality of her output to decrease by four percentage points. These findings have important implications for employers in terms of optimal contract structure and monitoring. Further, the analysis presents novel evidence on worker behavior that makes significant contributions to the field of labor economics. Namely, while a large body of literature has examined the productivity-effects of various workplace policies, this is the first to document the negative externalities these impose on quality.The third chapter of my dissertation uses nationally representative data from the National Agricultural Workers Survey to examine the labor supply determinants of U.S. crop workers. In this paper, I present trends in the demographic profile of the U.S. agricultural workforce, I demonstrate the link between intensive-margin labor supply and the changing demographic characteristics, and I examine the potential of various employer policies for increasing intensive-margin labor supply. I find statistically significant differences in labor supply across several key demographic characteristics: citizenship status, age, parental status, and gender. I find that native-born citizens work fewer hours per week and fewer weeks per year than both documented and undocumented immigrant workers. I find that middle-aged workers (aged 25-44) work more hours per week than younger or older workers, but older workers (aged 45 and up) work more weeks each year. I find that parents work significantly more weeks per year than non-parents but work a similar number of hours. Males work significantly more hours and weeks than females. I additionally show causal evidence on the effects of various employer policies on intensive-margin labor supply. Among offering higher wages, health benefits, or pay bonuses, I find that bonuses are the only employer policy that statistically significantly increase worker labor supply. I find that offering a bonus causes the average worker to increase weekly hours of labor by ten percent and to increase annual weeks working in agriculture by 6.5 weeks. My findings imply that the way in which the the agricultural workforce is aging will cause the hours and weeks of labor provided by employed farmworkers to increase, while the changes in gender and family composition will cause labor supply to decrease. Further, my findings suggest that an effective employer option for increasing both hours and weeks of work in agriculture is to offer workers bonuses. These findings bear importance for employers, academics, and policy makers seeking to better understand the US agricultural workforce.
Author: Paul E. McNamara Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 19
Book Description
Determining the causality between health measures and both income and labor productivity remains an ongoing challenge for economists. This review paper aims to answer the question: Does improved population health lead to higher rates of agricultural growth? In attempting to answer this question, we survey the empirical literature at micro and macro levels concerning the link between health investments and agricultural productivity. The evidence from some micro-level studies suggests that inexpensive health interventions can have a very large impact on labor productivity. The macro-level evidence at the country and global level, however, is mixed at best and in some cases suggests that health care interventions have no impact on income, much less on agricultural productivity. At both micro and macro levels, the literature does not provide a clear-cut answer to the question under investigation. Overall, the review reveals a great deal of heterogeneity in terms of estimation methods, definition and measurement of health variables, choice of economic outcomes, single-equation versus multiple-equation approach, and static versus dynamic approach. The actual magnitude of estimated elasticities is difficult to assess in part due to estimation bias caused by the endogeneity of health outcomes. We also found significant gaps in the literature; for example, very little attention is given to demand for health inputs by rural populations and farmers.
Author: National Research Council Publisher: National Academies Press ISBN: 0309124948 Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 292
Book Description
Increased agricultural productivity is a major stepping stone on the path out of poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, but farmers there face tremendous challenges improving production. Poor soil, inefficient water use, and a lack of access to plant breeding resources, nutritious animal feed, high quality seed, and fuel and electricity-combined with some of the most extreme environmental conditions on Earth-have made yields in crop and animal production far lower in these regions than world averages. Emerging Technologies to Benefit Farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia identifies sixty emerging technologies with the potential to significantly improve agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Eighteen technologies are recommended for immediate development or further exploration. Scientists from all backgrounds have an opportunity to become involved in bringing these and other technologies to fruition. The opportunities suggested in this book offer new approaches that can synergize with each other and with many other activities to transform agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Author: Amin William Mugera Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
This study applies recent advances in nonparametric techniques to investigate growth in labor productivity and convergence in the Kansas farm sector for a panel of 564 farms for the period 1993-2007. The study seeks to answer two questions: First, what are the sources of labor productivity growth in the farm sector and second, is there evidence of convergence or divergence in the growth rate of labor productivity across farms? Following Kumar and Russell (2002), the nonparametric production frontier approach is used to decompose the growth in output per worker into three components: efficiency change, technical change, and capital deepening. Kernel density estimation methods are used to investigate the evolution of the entire distribution of labor productivity and the effects of each of those three growth components on the evolution of the distributions over the sample periods, 1993-07, 1993-02, and 1996-05. Cross-sectional regression methods (ordinary least square, partial linear model, and smooth coefficient model) are later employed to test for convergence in labor productivity growth and the contribution of each of the components to the convergence process. The study yields the following results. First, capital deepening and technical change are the main sources of labor productivity growth. Efficiency change is a source of regress in productivity growth. Second, technical change is not neutral. Third, the distribution of labor productivity in the farm sector has remained unimodal. Capital deepening and technical change are the main factors contributing to labor productivity distributions. Fourth, despite no evidence of technological catching-up, efficiency change and capital deepening contributed to convergence in the growth rate of labor productivity during the entire sample period. Technical change contributes to productivity disparity in the 1993-07 period. The contribution of technical change in the 1993-02 and 1996-05 periods are mixed with evidence of both convergence and disparity. Finally, the results for the 1993-07 period support the existence of a positive relationship between the annual growth in technical change and initial level of capital-labor ratio, suggesting that technology is embodied in capital accumulation.
Author: Virgil Ball Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 1461508517 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
Agricultural Productivity: Measurement and Sources of Growth addresses measurement issues and techniques in agricultural productivity analysis, applying those techniques to recently published data sets for American agriculture. The data sets are used to estimate and explain state level productivity and efficiency differences, and to test different approaches to productivity measurement. The rise in agricultural productivity is the single most important source of economic growth in the U.S. farm sector, and the rate of productivity growth is estimated to be higher in agriculture than in the non-farm sector. It is important to understand productivity sources and to measure its growth properly, including the effects of environmental externalities. Both the methods and the data can be accessed by economists at the state level to conduct analyses for their own states. In a sense, although not explicitly, the book provides a guide to using the productivity data available on the website of the U.S. Department of Agriculture/Economic Research Service. It should be of interest to a broad spectrum of professionals in academia, the government, and the private sector.
Author: Gudrun Kochendörfer-Lucius Publisher: World Bank Publications ISBN: 0821371282 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 245
Book Description
The book highlights proceedings from the Berlin 2008: Agriculture and Development conference held in preparation for the World Development Report 2008.
Author: Kwadwo Asenso-Okyere
Author: Kwadwo Asenso-Okyere
Author: Alexandra Estvan Hill
Author: Paul E. McNamara
Author: Reuben William Hecht
Author: National Research Council
Author: Reuben William Hecht
Author: Amin William Mugera
Author: Virgil Ball
Author: Gudrun Kochendörfer-Lucius
Author: Fahima Aziz