Gendered farm work, off-farm employment, and decision-making power: Quantitative evidence from Tajikistan
Gendered farm work, off-farm employment, and decision-making power: Quantitative evidence from Tajikistan

Author: Lambrecht, Isabel

Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst

Published: 2022-12-30

Total Pages: 34

ISBN-13:

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Globally, nearly half of all workers in rural areas work in agriculture (International Labour Organization 2020). Women are heavily involved in agricultural production, but often get assigned different roles and responsibilities compared to men (Doss 2018). In many contexts, women have less decision-making power than men regarding their households’ agricultural production or on how to spend agricultural income (FAO 2011). Yet, recent evidence suggests that a generalized assumption that women have no or little decision-making power in agriculture is misplaced and that there are also settings where joint decision-making between men and women is common (Akter et al. 2017; Maligalig et al. 2019). It therefore remains imperative to add new evidence on women’s and men’s roles and decision-making in agriculture – particularly from contexts that have not been extensively studied.

Migration, local off-farm employment, and agricultural production efficiency
Migration, local off-farm employment, and agricultural production efficiency

Author: Yang, Jin

Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst

Published: 2014-04-04

Total Pages: 24

ISBN-13:

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This paper studies the effect of local off-farm employment and migration on rural households’ technical efficiency of crop production using a five-year panel dataset from more than 2,000 households in five Chinese provinces. While there is not much debate about the positive contribution of migration and local off-farm employment to China’s economy, there is an increasing concern about the potential negative effects of moving labor away from agriculture on China’s future food security. This is a critical issue as maintaining self-sufficiency in grain production will be critical for China to feed its huge population in the future. Several papers have studied the impact of migration on production and yield with mixed results. But the impact of migration on technical efficiency is rarely studied. Methodologically, we incorporate the correlated random-effects approach into the standard stochastic production frontier model to control for unobservable that are correlated with migration and off-farm employment decisions and technical efficiency. The most consistent result that emerged from our econometric analysis is that neither migration nor local off-farm employment has a negative effect on the technical efficiency of grain production, which does not support the widespread notion that vast-scale labor migration could negatively affect China’s future food security.