This study evaluated the impact of agricultural cooperative membership on the wellbeing of smallholder farmers using cross-sectional data collected from the eastern part of Ethiopia. Using consumption per adult equivalent as a wellbeing indicator, we measured the impact of agricultural cooperative membership by implementing propensity score matching and endogenous switching regression estimation techniques. Both estimation methods indicate that joining agricultural cooperatives has a positive impact on the wellbeing of smallholder farmers. Furthermore, the analysis also indicates that agricultural cooperative membership has a heterogeneous impact on wellbeing among its members.

This article analyzes the impact of participation in off-farm activities on technical efficiency of maize production in eastern Ethiopia. We combined propensity score matching with a stochastic production frontier model that corrects sample selection bias resulting from unobserved factors that potentially affect both households' decision to participate in off-farm activities and technical efficiency scores that most previous studies do not account for. The probit model results indicate that sex of the household head, literacy of the spouse, agricultural cooperative membership, family size, and access to market information had significant effect on farmers' participation in off-farm activities. In the meantime, it was found that farmers who participated in off-farm activities have a significant technical efficiency gain compared with their non-participant counterparts.

The aim of this study is to measure the impact of improved maize varieties on farm productivity and smallholders' wellbeing using data collected from the East Hararghe Zone of Ethiopia. We combined propensity score matching method with endogenous switching regression to estimate the impact on the welfare of farmers and we applied the stochastic frontier corrected for sample selection to measure the impact on farm productivity. The results show that adoption of improved maize varieties leads to significant gains in wellbeing and improves farm productivity. ARTICLE HISTORY

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