Das Kräftespiel von Land und Arbeit in den Transformationsprozessen afrikanischer Volkswirtschaften
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
This project made an important contribution to understanding the effects of changing land and labor dynamics through land consolidation and rising rural wages on agricultural production and rural development in the ongoing structural transformation processes in SSA. By combining and further developing empirical and simulation modeling techniques we evaluated short-term impacts of land and labor dynamics on farm production in three different African countries and long-term macroeconomic implications on the case study of Ghana. We first studied the effect of rising wages on adaptive responses of smallholder farmers with respect to their agricultural production technologies in Ghana, Tanzania, and Malawi. We find that farmers in all three countries exhibit flexible production technologies, adjusting to rising wages with imperfect substitution between capital and labor. We estimate non-unitary and inelastic substitution elasticities suggesting that capital and labor are gross complements rather than substitutes. Because of this complementarity, we find that higher wages are likely to deter capital investments in agriculture. This means that structural change could negatively affect agricultural productivity of smallholder farmers and thus rural development. We further analyze the relationship between farm size and Total Factor Productivity (TFP) for all three countries. Our results challenge the traditional inverse relationship hypothesis and reveal significant heterogeneity and nonlinearity in the farm size-productivity relationship across the regions. In Ghana and Tanzania, a positive correlation between farm size and TFP is observed, suggesting economies of scale and the potential benefits of medium-scale farming. In Malawi, the relationship is not statistically significant. Using various econometric methods, we capture both macro (region-time) and micro (household-time) dimensions, which were decisive to explain the heterogeneity. Our project results paint a mixed picture of the role of land and labor dynamics for the agricultural sector in SSA, where smallholder farmers seem to be negatively affected, but medium to large farms rather benefit. Overall, the project took longer than anticipated due to several reasons namely the underestimated time needed for cleaning and preparing data from multiple household panel surveys for three African countries when writing the proposal, the difficult circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic and the delayed provision of data especially for the macroeconomic analysis in the second part of the project. Nevertheless, the project results are an essential step in understanding the role of land and labor dynamics for the agricultural sector in SSA and have been crucial in designing a follow up international collaboration that aims to disentangle the effects of structural transformation on technology uptake, labor and land productivity, and environmental consequences with a specific gender perspective using Kenya as a case study.
