Abstract
Using productivity change as a measure of farm economic performance, we analyze the relationship between women’s empowerment in agriculture and farm productivity change and its components, which include efficiency change, technological change, and scale efficiency change. A non-parametric Malmquist approach is used to measure farm specific productivity change and its decomposition. We use a bootstrap regression to analyze factors that cause differences in productivity change and its components, testing, in particular, the role women’s empowerment plays. The empirical application focuses on a sample of Bangladesh rice farms over the crop cultivation period 2011 and 2014. Results suggest that improvements in women’s empowerment in agriculture were associated with higher levels of productivity change, efficiency change, and technical change, while they had no impact on scale efficiency change. We find that empowering women, specifically, improving their ability to make independent choices regarding agricultural production had a statistically significant positive association with productivity change, efficiency change, and technical change. We also find that lowering the gender parity gap is positively related with improving productivity of the sample farms.
Highlights
Agricultural productivity growth is an important component of any development strategy [1,2]
The relationship between productivity change and women’s empowerment can be conceptualized in terms of a collective bargaining model, where a household shares a stock of resources, and the allocation and use of which is influenced by bargaining power or gendered division of preferences and weights that are being placed on different intrahousehold decisions
Empowerment in the production domain is positively associated with technical change as the results reveal that it can lead to technological gains of about 0.12% In the main model (Model 1), the rest of the women’s empowerment in agriculture index (WEAI) domains were not found to have a statistically significant effect on productivity change and its components, except for the leadership domain which is weakly significant only in one out of the three models tested
Summary
Agricultural productivity growth is an important component of any development strategy [1,2]. Productivity growth can be viewed as an indicator of a farm’s ability to persist in an environment where market, regulatory, and environmental pressures may reduce its competitiveness and even lead to farm exit. Given the importance of agricultural productivity growth for development and agriculture’s economic sustainability, extensive research has been put into measuring productivity change and understanding the factors that drive it. Prominent among the factors that have been investigated to better understand changes in productivity are farm and farmer characteristics, farm policies, and climatic conditions [3,4,5]. Women’s empowerment and its relationship with farm-level productivity, have not been studied in depth so far, they might be relevant, especially in developing countries where women make up for 43% of the agricultural labor force [6].
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