Xavier Irz

Agricultural Productivity Growth and Poverty Alleviation

How important is agricultural growth to poverty reduction? This article first sets out the theoretical reasons for expecting agricultural growth to reduce poverty. Several plausible and strong arguments apply - including the creation of jobs on the land, linkages from farming to the rest of the rural economy, and a decline in the real cost of food for the whole economy - but the degree of impact is in all cases qualified by particular circumstances. Hence, the article deploys a cross-country estimation of the links between agricultural yield per unit area and measures of poverty. This produces strong confirmation of the hypothesised linkages. It is unlikely that there are many other development interventions capable of reducing the numbers in poverty so effectively.

Profitability and technical efficiency of aquaculture systems in pampaanga, philippines

Abstract We evaluate the profitability and technical efficiency of aquaculture in the Philippines. Farm‐level data are used to compare two production systems corresponding to the intensive monoculture of tilapia in freshwater ponds and the extensive polyculture of shrimps and fish in brackish water ponds. Both activities are very lucrative, with brackish water aquaculture achieving the higher level of profit per farm. Stochastic frontier production functions reveal that technical efficiency is low in brackish water aquaculture, with a mean of 53%, explained primarily by the operators experience and by the frequency of his visits to the farm. In freshwater aquaculture, the farms achieve a mean efficiency level of 83%. The results suggest that the provision of extension services to brackish water fish farms might be a cost‐effective way of increasing production and productivity in that sector. By contrast, technological change will have to be the driving force of future productivity growth in freshwater aquaculture.

Can the world feed itself? some insights from growth theory

This paper develops a two-sector growth model incorporating the essential distinguishing features of agriculture, including the reliance of production on a natural resource base as well as on industrially produced inputs, the low income elasticity of demand for food and the life-sustaining function of food consumption. In this framework, the ability of an economy to supply an adequate supply of food to a growing population can be related to the existence of a steady state. This property is used to define a simple analytical criterion upon which to assess the long-term food situation of a closed economy. This sustainability condition relates all the dynamic parameters of the economy: rates of technological change in the two sectors, rate of population growth and rate of land degradation. The condition is used to highlight the technological characteristics in agriculture conducive to sustainability and to assess empirically the food situation of a number of countries. Although no global food crisis appears to be looming ahead, the data suggest that sub-Saharan Africa is likely to increase its food dependence in the future.

Productivity and farm profit – a microeconomic analysis of the cereal sector in England and Wales

This article implements the profit change decomposition methodology developed by Grifell-Tatjé and Lovell (1999). Profit change over time is first decomposed into a price effect and a quantity effect; the quantity effect is then decomposed into a productivity effect and an activity effect; in turn, the productivity effect is subdivided into a technical efficiency effect and a technical change effect, while the activity effect is divided into a scale effect, resource mix effect and product mix effect. The end result is therefore a measure of six distinct components of profit change. The methodology is used to investigate profit changes for a sample of cereal farms drawn from the Farm Business Survey in England and Wales for the period 1982 to 2000. The results of the analysis show an overall decline in profit levels for the period at the average speed of £4400 annually, with the major part of this decline attributable to a negative price effect amounting to £7000 annually on average. However, this was to some degree offset by a positive quantity effect largely driven by the positive contribution of technical change to profit growth, worth £4000 annually on average.

Hierarchical Analysis of Production Efficiency in a Coastal Trawl Fishery

We present, pedagogically, the Bayesian approach to composed error models under alternative, hierarchical characterizations; demonstrate, briefly, the Bayesian approach to model comparison using recent advances in Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods; and illustrate, empirically, the value of these techniques to natural resource economics and coastal fisheries management, in particular. The Bayesian approach to fisheries efficiency analysis is interesting for at least three reasons. First, it is a robust and highly flexible alternative to commonly applied, frequentist procedures, which dominate the literature. Second, the Bayesian approach is extremely simple to implement, requiring only a modest addition to most natural-resource economist tool-kits. Third, despite its attractions, applications of Bayesian methodology in coastal fisheries management are few.

Efficiency and Farm Size in Philippine Aquaculture. Analysis in a Ray Production Frontier Framework

We investigate the existence of an inverse relationship (IR) between farm size and technical efficiency in Philippine brackishwater pond aquaculture. The study is motivated by the exemption of fish ponds from the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Laws and suggestions in the literature of inefficient management of fish farms. The analysis of technical efficiency is based on the estimation of a multi-product ray production function estimated in a stochastic frontier framework. There is some evidence of an IR but of only limited strength. Hence, it is unlikely that agrarian reform is the key to unlocking the productive potential of brackishwater aquaculture in the Philippines.

AN EMPIRICAL TYPOLOGY OF BRACKISH-WATER POND AQUACULTURE SYSTEMS IN THE PHILIPPINES: A TOOL TO AID COMPARATIVE STUDY IN THE SECTOR

Aquaculture in the Philippines is long-established but has witnessed rapid technical change in the last 20 years with the introduction of hatchery technology and commercial feed mills changing the production possibilities for a fishpond operator. To understand the sector, a typology of brackish-water pond farming systems is constructed using multivariate methods (principal components analysis, cluster analysis). Eight input variables across all major factors of production are used in the analysis, gathered from a net sample of 136 farms in two regions in 2003. Three latent variables are described, accounting for 58% of variance in the original data: specialization; land vs. labor intensity; and feeding intensity. Five clusters (farm types) are subsequently described: extensive polyculture (40% of sample); semi-intensive prawn-oriented polyculture (11%); low-input labor-intensive farms (27%); very large, extensive milkfish-oriented farms (8%); and semi-intensive milkfish monoculture farms (14%). Implications for technical efficiency estimation and comparative study of economic indicators are discussed.