Download or read book Three Essays on the Impact of Agricultural Decisions in Africa written by Thomas Taeksung Kim and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I examine agricultural decisions in a developing country context, which cover the major part of life and industry in low-income countries. I question stylized facts about major agricultural activities, evaluate its economic benefit with more thorough econometric methodologies, and present new aspect of its effectiveness. The first paper discusses a possible ineffective farm output resulted from farm-level crop diversification. Using a farm-by-crop level dataset from four Southeastern African countries and exogenous variation from the temporal standard deviation of normalized differences in a vegetation index (NDVI), I find a possible non-positive contribution of farm-level crop diversification on crop output. Based on this observation, I introduce two motives for crop diversification as adding new crops in the crop portfolio: 1) farmers adopt new crops for which they have better crop-specific farmer ability, and 2) farmers adopt new crops with better response to agricultural shocks. Then, I check the model empirically and find that the newly added crops show insignificant response to the NDVI shocks but significantly worse crop-specific farmer ability, which implies the possible economic disadvantage of crop diversification. I further present supporting evidence of output drop due to crop diversification with a series of supplementary analyses. Lastly, I examine different newly adopted crop groups driving different diversification outcomes. Throughout the paper, I present empirical support for the possible output drop due to farm-level crop diversification. The risk of a large drop in crop-specific farmer ability calls for a careful approach of governments and agencies encouraging crop diversification as a risk coping strategy. In the second paper, I examine if living in a community with diverse food production is important for a diverse diet. This paper responds to the large literature suggesting a strong impact of farm-level food diversification on diet. I introduce a new source for diverse household diet, diverse food production at the community level. Using household fixed effects, a spatial autoregression model, and data from Ethiopia, I find a significantly positive association between community-level agricultural production diversity and household diet diversity, while the impact of farm-level crop production diversity is rather limited and reduces the diversity of purchased food consumption. I further examine the association by each food group and check if household consumption of each food group is affected by community- or farm-level production of the corresponding food group. I find a positive contribution of community and farm production on consuming the purchased and own-produced foods, respectively. I finally found that this impact of community production is strengthened by three channels that accelerate the local food circulation: presence of a community market; crop sales within a village; and gifting food behaviors. All the evidence points to the importance of community-level food production. With a loosely integrated market in Ethiopia, local agricultural production plays a significant role for household diet as much or more than farm-level crop diversification. The final paper examines the relationship between rural maize price and local maize yields in agriculture-centered developing countries. Most studies about staple price construction in the developing world focus on price transmission from outside countries or between major domestic markets. Instead, I focus on rural areas in four African countries and point to the significant role of local maize production in constructing the rural maize price. I first create various local maize yield measures by taking the median of all yields within different radii around each village. Then, I derive a trend of association between price and local yield as widening the radius of local yield. In addition, I examine if this estimated relationship varies with village characteristics: proportion of large size farmers; level of maize production; and distance to city, market, and road. I find a negative relationship between rural maize price and yields at the local level controlling for the village fixed effect and global maize price. This relationship becomes stronger in the villages with more smallholder farmers and poor accessibility to major market features. I detect an active rural maize market and find that the local production plays a significant role in constructing the maize price.