Abstract
The emergence of agricultural cooperatives is extensively viewed as a necessary institutional arrangement that can help farmers in developing countries overcome the constraints that impede them from improving sustainable agricultural production and acquiring new marketing opportunities. Therefore, this study examines the determinants of cooperative membership and its impact on fish farm household income, using data collected from two regions in Ghana. An endogenous switching regression (ESR) model is utilized to address the potential sample selection bias issue. The results show that household heads’ decisions to join cooperatives are affected by their access to credit, off-farm work, education level, and peer influence. Cooperative membership can increase both household and farm income by 28.54% and 34.75%, respectively. Moreover, we show that different groups of households’ cooperative impacts on farm and household income are heterogeneous. Our findings highlight the importance of cooperative patronization and provide implications that can improve households’ welfare.
Highlights
The source of animal protein of about one billion individuals in the world is fish [1].Captured fisheries and aquaculture sector contributions to world development cannot be concealed
Aside from the study of Ma and Abdulai [29], which employed the endogenous switching regression (ESR) model to explore the impact of cooperatives on agriculture production, the remaining research used the propensity score matching (PSM) estimation method, which only accounts for observable factors
Unlike the PSM, which does not account for unobserved characteristics such as the household head’s innate attitudes, perceptions, and motivations, selection bias arising from both observe and unobserved characteristics can be resolved by the ESR model [29,43]
Summary
The source of animal protein of about one billion individuals in the world is fish [1]. Despite the attention given by the government to improving aquaculture and its growth in the country, its core players (fish farmers) are faced with challenges such as inadequate capital and credit facilities and high cost of production [4,8]. Quantitative analyses [26], which fail to account for selection bias This present study’s primary objective is to explore the impact of cooperative membership on fish farm household income. Aside from the study of Ma and Abdulai [29], which employed the ESR model to explore the impact of cooperatives on agriculture production, the remaining research used the propensity score matching (PSM) estimation method, which only accounts for observable factors. Our paper focuses on fish farm households, while Ma and Abdulai’s [29] study focused on crop farm households
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