Spatial Econometric Analysis: Potential Contribution to the Economic Analysis of Smallholder Development

Abstract

The stars appear to be aligned for a sustained effort to improve information to rural development policy makers about the impact space has on the opportunities for development of the ubiquitous smallholder households in rural areas of Southeast Asian countries. The influences of spatially heterogeneous resource constraints on farming activities, distance to markets and institutions, and spatial interaction among smallholders can now be better accounted for in modelling work as a result of improvements in analytical methodologies, the growing availability of so-called 'big data' and access to spatially defined information in panel data sets. The scope for taking advantage of these advances is demonstrated with two examples from a Southeast Asian country, the Philippines: spillovers and neighbourhood effects in impact studies and the development of sophisticated spatial stochastic frontier models to measure and decompose productivity growth on smallholdings.

Neighborhood Effects in Hybrid Rice Adoption in Davao del Sur, Philippines

“…In the Philippines, several studies have included the spatial aspect in modeling rice production (Nalica 2010;Villanueva et al 2017;Pede et al 2018;Villano et al 2016). More specifically, by incorporating spatial dependence, the farmers' production performance was found to be influenced by their proximity to their neighboring conventional rice farmers (Villanueva et al 2017;Pede et al 2018).…”