Is wealth found in the soil or in the brain? Investing in farm people in Malawi

Abstract

Should a typical developing country invest more in agriculture or education? At what stage of development is it optimal to invest more in each of these sectors? Every developing country government grapples with these questions annually when designing a national budget. In this paper, I provide estimates of agricultural returns to schooling in Malawi-evidence of such returns implies a more complex non-separable decision process to answer the first question. While a large development economics literature has documented the effects of schooling on agricultural incomes, such estimates are potentially biased because of unobserved heterogeneity and selection bias. In this paper, I use 2010-2013 two period nationally representative panel survey data in Malawi and rely on the exogenous education policy changes and spatial variation in access to schooling to identify effects of schooling on agricultural incomes. In addition, I use recent econometric methods to correct for selection into income activities within a panel data and instrumental variables estimation framework. I find annual agricultural returns to one additional year of schooling in Malawi that range from 3% to 7%.

Hand pollination, mass spraying, and hybrid seedlings: Do these technologies affect the welfare of smallholder cocoa farmers in Ghana?

“…Education plays an important role in the adoption of agricultural technologies (Mkondiwa, 2023; Nguyen et al, 2023; Nnaji et al, 2023). The positive and significant effect of education in adopting H 0 M 1 S 0 indicates that farmers having more years of schooling have a higher likelihood of adopting this combination.…”

“…The sampled farmers have spent an average of 6.52 years in school. This means that most farmers have completed primary education and are expected to be able to read and write, hence increasing their likelihood to adopt new technologies (Mkondiwa, 2023; Nnaji et al, 2023). Furthermore, Table 1 shows that smallholder farmers who adopted cocoa technologies in combinations obtained high cocoa yield, gross cocoa income, and low food insecurity but higher per capita consumption expenditure among non‐adopters than adopters.…”