Previous studies of tenancy and land reform programs suggest that these programs substantially increased agricultural productivity. However, these studies are limited to sharecropping environments. This paper investigates the productivity effect of the 1953 land ownership transfer program in Taiwan, where fixed-rental contracts predominated. This program transferred 27% of the paddy land to inc...

Increased agricultural productivity is a key driver of wider agriculture-led economic growth and resilience in many regions heavily burdened by food insecurity, malnutrition, and poverty, and it’s essential to achieving Feed the Future’s objectives, which are guided by the U.S. Government’s Global Food Security Strategy (GFSS). Greater agricultural productivity can increase food availability an...

Shifting cultivation is a traditional agricultural practice in most tropical regions of the world and has the potential to provide for human livelihoods while hosting substantial biodiversity. Little is known about the resilience of shifting cultivation to increasing agricultural demands on the landscape or to unexpected disturbances. To investigate these issues, we develop a simple social-ecol...

The theory of neoclassical welfare economics largely shaped international and national agricultural policies during the Cold War period. It treated technology as an exogenous factor that could boost agricultural productivity but not necessarily sustainable agriculture. New growth theory, the economic theory of the new knowledge economy, treats technological change as endogenous and argues that ...

This paper investigates the growth experience of one country in detail in order to enhance our understanding of important factors that affect economic growth. Using a two-sector model, we identify the low productivity growth in the agricultural sector as the main reason for the divergence of income per capita between Turkey and its peer countries between 1968 and 2005. An extended model that in...

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Agricultural laborers frequently work for piece rate wages – where they are paid per unit of output rather than per unit of time – based on the assumption that these wages incentivize productivity. In this paper, I exploit quasi-experimental variation to estimate the elasticity of labor productivity with respect to piece rate wages by analyzing a high-frequency panel of over 2,000 blueberry pic...

Agriculture in Canada was substantively transformed in the past century. In absolute terms, agricultural production increased considerably. For example, production of wheat, a major Canadian crop, based initially on the improved variety Marquis, trebled from 1908 to 2008. New crops, such as canola—improved varieties of rapeseed—on the Prairies and soybeans in Ontario, are now widely grown. Simi...

This paper explores the relationship between migration and agricultural productivity in Ethiopia. Given that there are fairly significant returns to either rural-urban or international migration for labor in Ethiopia, it could be that credit constraints hindering migration start-up are an unexplored constraint against migration. The paper primarily uses the Ethiopia Rural Household Survey panel...