Peter Kilby

The Role of Nonfarm Activities in the Rural Economy

Until quite recently it has been conventional to equate, in a rough way, the rural economy with the agricultural economy. Rural households, containing anywhere from 30 to 70 per cent of the nation’s population, were envisaged as having as their primary function the production of food and fibre for the home market and one or more crops for the export market. In addition to farm production, household members might as secondary activities be engaged in a certain amount of agricultural processing, transporting and marketing.

Exploring the relationship between price and quality for the case of hand-rolled cigars

Abstract We consider whether either overall quality ratings, or hedonic equations including multiple sensory and objective characteristics, can explain price variance among hand-rolled cigars. Overall ratings have little relationship to price, but hedonic equations are relatively effective at explaining cigar price, and also at explaining cigar ratings. Perversely, the explanatory power of the hedonic price equation declines over time, although the size of the premium for Cuban cigars remains relatively constant. We consider alternative explanations for the rising residual, including the possibility that it is indicative of significant nonfunctional utility related to consumption of this product.

The Heffalump Revisited

Professor Peter Kilby is the author of “Hunting the Heffalump,” a classic in the entrepreneurship literature. In this opening article he returns to the propositions he set forth more than 30 years ago. He refines his earlier notion of the entrepreneurial task and probes more deeply into non-economic factors that can create a deficiency of the supply of requisite entrepreneurial services at the national level. Once again, Professor Kilby provides the reader with a wealth of insights and once again his major argument is sure to stir controversy.

Evaluating technical assistance

Abstract Despite a quarter of a century of experience and billions of dollars invested, we have very little hard information as to what works and what does not in the field of technical assistance. After a brief review of the institutional factors that have prevented ex post project evaluation, case histories of a sample of 11 UNDP technical cooperation ventures are given. A methodology for quantifying costs and benefits is presented and applied to the sample. The mean benefit—cost ratio is modest, but the dispersion is high—suggesting that there are indeed valuable lessons to be learned from this type of research. The latter are set forth in the concluding section of the paper in the form of tentative hypotheses about choice of activity, project design and project management.

Succession-Related Mortality Among Small Firms in Nigeria

A strong consensus exists among analysts of the small business sector of developing economies that this sector is characterised by phenomenally high business mortality. Extant efforts at explaining this volatility have focused pre-eminently on economic factors. Such preoccupation with economic factors in the analysis of the instability of the small business sector has had a crippling effect on the ability of analysts to explore other potential but non-economic sources of instability. In this article, the authors venture into the relatively uncharted terrain of succession analysis using longitudinal data on small firms in Nigeria. They found that most of the closures were succession-related, occurring in the mature age of firms. These firms exhibited longevity uncharacteristic of firms in this sector: the instability that typifies the sector may coexist with extraordinary survival capacity. These are preliminary findings that, if sustained by subsequent studies, portend major implicationsfor research and policy in this sector.

Interrelations between Agricultural and Industrial Growth

The main objective of this condensed statement is to provide a ‘scaffold’ from which to view the more important interrelationships between agriculture and other economic sectors in the course of economic growth. The first section describes the process of structural transformation and the increase in sectoral interdependence that characterises modern economic growth. In the second section attention is focused on factors that determine the growth of farm cash income and an analysis of the effects of the cash disbursements of farm households on the development of other economic sectors. A final section considers some of the policy implications of the interrelationships between agriculture and industry that exist during various phases of development.

Farm and factory: A comparison of the skill requirements for the transfer of technology

Among the disparate ingredients of technical advance in agriculture and industry, labour skill is perhaps the only dimension in which the mechanics of development in these two sectors are comparable. In this paper, the organization of traditional production in the pure subsistence economy is described, and then we consider the changes in organization and skill requirements that occur as development proceeds, first for manufacture and then for agriculture, bringing into focus oft‐cited but usually undefined cultural factors which mould role behaviour of employees. Implicit in the analysis is a three‐fold partitioning of human work performance into specific technical skills, internal organizational activities of control and co‐ordination and activities related to external market transactions.