The impact of agricultural extension on farm production in resettlement areas of Zimbabwe
2001
T Owens | J Hoddinott | B Kinsey
This paper examines the impact of agricultural extension on farm production. It analyses two aspects of available data: its longitudinal nature and explicit measures of farmer ability.It finds that after controlling for innate productivity characteristics and farmer ability either using household fixed effects estimation, or by including a measure of farmer ability and village fixed effects, access to agricultural extension services, defined as receiving one or two visits per agricultural year, raises the value of crop production by about 15 per cent. This parameter estimate is statistically significant. However, it also finds variability in these parameter estimates across individual crop years, with the impact being markedly different in drought and non-drought years.Collectively, these results suggest that although access to farm-level extension visits does increase productivity even after controlling for innate productivity characteristics and farmer ability, results from single-year cross-sectional studies should be treated with caution.[author]
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