Identification of the Inverse Relationship Between Farm Size and Productivity: An Empirical Analysis of Peasant Agricultural Production

Fact or Artefact: The Impact of Measurement Errors on the Farm Size - Productivity Relationship

“…Given the supportive evidence provided by several of the contributions to the inverse farm size productivity debate (Lau and Yotopoulos 1971;Berry and Cline 1979;Kutcher and Scandizzo 1981;Carter 1984;Eswaran and Kotwal 1985;1986;Barrett 1996; Udry 1996; Benjamin and Brandt 2002), we expect labor market imperfections to give an advantage to farms able to rely on family labor, and hence a positive sign on the coefficient on this variable.…”

“…Starting with the seminal work of Sen (1962Sen ( , 1966 who observed an inverse relationship between farm size and output per hectare in Indian agriculture, a large number of empirical studies have presented evidence that appears to corroborate that hypothesis (Barrett, 1996;Carter, 1984, Eswaran and Kotwal, 1985, 1986Lau and Yotopoulos, 1971;Benjamin and Brandt, 2002;Berry and Cline, 1979). A smaller set of empirical studies however does not find evidence of such a relationship (Hill, 1972, Kevane, 1996, Zaibet and Dunn, 1998.…”

The agroecological matrix as alternative to the land-sparing/agriculture intensification model

“…For example, analyzing data relating farm size to productivity (output per unit area), Cornia (67) found that in all cases the trend was decreasing productivity as farm size increased. Indeed, the "productivity-size inverse relationship" is a well-known fact among agricultural economists, and was first pointed out by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen in the 1960s (68,69). It seems that small owner-operated farms tend to be more efficient in that the farmer knows the land and its ecology well, and plants crops with that knowledge, usually using a multicropping strategy to take advantage of local peculiarities such as, for example, the Kayapó's management of their Amazonian landscape where the patches of the matrix are an entangled mosaic that takes advantage of microclimatic and soil differences to produce and promote hundreds of species of plants and animals (70).…”

Productivity, Technical Efficiency, and Farm Size in Paraguayan Agriculture

“…This Indian debate sparked many similar debates and studies in the rest of the world, in which many explanations have been proffered for the inverse relationship, some by those advocating for land reform and others by those who question its wisdom. Carter (1984) sets out many of the possible explanations for the observed inverse relationship. Village-specific factors might be correlated to farm size (such as the Malthusian argument that greater land quality would lead to greater population density).…”