Agricultural Factor Markets in Sub-Saharan Africa : An Updated View with Formal Tests for Market Failure

This paper uses the recently collected Living Standard Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture Initiative data sets from five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to provide a comprehensive overview of land and labor market participation by...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Dillon, Brian, Barrett, Christopher B.
Format: Policy Research Working Paper
Language:English
en_US
Published: World Bank Group, Washington, DC 2014
Subjects:
Online Access:http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2014/11/20395956/agricultural-factor-markets-sub-saharan-africa-updated-view-formal-tests-market-failure
http://hdl.handle.net/10986/20648
Description
Summary:This paper uses the recently collected Living Standard Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture Initiative data sets from five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to provide a comprehensive overview of land and labor market participation by agrarian households and to formally test for failures in factor markets. Under complete and competitive markets, households can solve their consumption and production problems separately, so that household factor endowments do not predict input demand. This paper implements a simple, theoretically grounded test of this separation hypothesis, which can be interpreted as a reduced form test of factor market failure. In all five study countries, the analysis finds strong evidence of factor market failure. Moreover, those failures appear general and structural, not specific to subpopulations defined by gender or geography.