Abstract
Our study provides a nationally representative analysis of the gender gap in agricultural productivity in Malawi. We decompose the gap, for the first time, at the mean and selected points of the agricultural productivity distribution into (i) a portion driven by gender differences in levels of observable attributes, and (ii) a portion driven by gender differences in returns to the same set of observables. We find that while female-managed plots are, on average, 25% less productive, 82% of this mean differential is explained by differences in observables, mainly due to high-value crop cultivation and household adult male labor inputs.
Highlights
1.4 billion people, or one quarter of the population of the developing world, live in extreme poverty, and an additional 1.2 billion live in moderate poverty
This study offers a fresh look at gender differences in sub-Saharan African agricultural productivity, the alleviation of which have been advocated by governments and international donor community as one of the key drivers of broad, agriculture-based economic growth and ensuing gains in living standards
While the gender gap in Malawi is estimated at 25.4 percent at the mean, it ranges from 22.6 percent at the 10th percentile to 37.6 percent at the 90th percentile
Summary
1.4 billion people, or one quarter of the population of the developing world, live in extreme poverty, and an additional 1.2 billion live in moderate poverty. A considerable majority of the studies of the second strand of the literature on the gender gap in sub-Saharan Africa originate from West Africa, from Ghana and Burkina Faso, where it is common for households to have several agricultural plots and for male and female plot managers to coexist in study households This allows authors to control for unobserved time-invariant household-crop-level heterogeneity in a multivariate regression framework and to estimate agricultural production functions for plots cultivated with the same crop, managed or owned by men and women in the same household. In the case of empirical studies that document statistically insignificant differences in agricultural productivity between female-managed and male-managed plots, conditional on plot-level observable and household-level unobservable attributes, the analytical framework is not set up to isolate relative contributions of relevant attributes towards the observed gender gap for the purpose of prioritizing areas for policy interventions
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