Contribution of Factors Affecting Crop Production in Bangladesh: An Empirical Analysis with Production Function Approach

Abstract

Bangladesh has achieved a tremendous success in food production in last few decades amidst challenges of land degradation, land use changes and climate effect. In spite of the increasing trend of yields of crops, there still remain some challenges to meet the growing needs due to increase in population and loss of land to development activities. This study aims to identify the rate of contributions or economics of factors of crop production in Bangladesh. Cobb-Douglas production function has been applied in this study of crop production using a number of production factors within the broad terms land, labour and capital. Secondary data, representing factors of production, have been selected based on literature reviews so that they can be appropriate for this study. Data of crop production have been considered as dependent variables, whereas, land area coverage for agricultural production, labour employed in agriculture, agricultural household expenditure, fertilizer applied and irrigation coverage have been considered as independent variables. Land and labour is negatively correlated with crop production, whereas, fertilizer is positively correlated. Crop production which shows decreasing return to scale deserves the adoption of new technology and good agricultural management practices.