The Welfare Effects of an Input Subsidy Program, Crop Diversification, and the Farm Size-Productivity Relationship in Sub-Saharan Africa Agriculture

Abstract

This dissertation is composed of three essays all dealing with sub-Saharan African Agriculture. In the first essay, I apply a relatively novel approach to the evaluation of input subsidy programs (ISPs) by estimating the consumer surplus accrued by direct beneficiaries of ISPs. I use this method to evaluate the welfare impact of subsidizing fertilizer for smallholder farmers in Malawi—a country that has the largest ISP in sub-Saharan Africa. In the second essay, we investigate the linkages between crop diversification, poverty, and experience with crop shocks in the context of Malawi. These relationships are less known in the literature that mostly shed light on the relationship between crop diversification and welfare outcomes such as dietary diversity, agricultural productivity, and education. In the last essay, we revisit the oft-observed inverse relationship (IR) between farm size and productivity in the development literature. Almost all the empirical investigations focus on smallholder agriculture. However, compared to small-scale farming, large commercial farms are considered to have the upper-hand in agricultural technological innovation, access to better inputs and mechanized farming, and economies of scale. It is, however, an open question whether they can reverse the IR between farm size and productivity. This paper investigates this relationship over large variations of farm sizes and different measures of productivity.