The Transition to Modern Agriculture: Contract Farming in Developing Economies Abstract Recent years have seen considerable interest in the impact of contract farming on farmers in developing countries, motivated out of belief that contract farming spurs the transition

Recent years have seen considerable interest in the impact of contract farming on farmers in developing countries, motivated out of belief that contract farming spurs the transition to modern agriculture. In this paper, we provide a thorough review of the empirical literature on contract farming in both developed and developing countries, paying careful attention to broad implications of this research for economic development. We first find empirical studies consistently support the positive contribution of contract farming to production and supply chain efficiency. We also find that most empirical studies identify a positive and significant effect of contract farming on farmer welfare, yet are often unable to reach consistent conclusions as to significant correlates of contract participation. We support our review with a meta-analysis of the empirical literature to identify study characteristics that are conditionally correlated with particular empirical outcomes. Our meta-analysis indicates that studies using larger, more recent datasets are more likely to report a priori expected empirical results, but that empirical findings are not statistically different across developmental status or agricultural commodities.