Crop Choices and Employment Uncertainty

ISBN-13: 9783639143218 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 136 str.

Syed Naimul Wadood

Opis

This book examines the link between agriculturalproduction decisions, particularly ex ante cropchoice decisions, and off-farm labor incomeopportunities available to the cultivator householdsin a developing country. The cultivator householdsoften use off-farm labor supply as an insuranceagainst shocks in crop income. Yet employment isuncertain in the off-farm labor market. This bookhypothesizes that, given limited opportunities for expost consumption smoothing, employment uncertainty inthe labor market influences risk averse farmers exante crop choice decisions and farmers would opt formore conservative crop choices in case they expectunfavorable supply opportunities in the off-farmlabor market at a later period. We develop anagricultural household model based on a two periodstochastic dynamic programming framework. This showsthat farmer expectations of a lower depth of thelabor market or a lower wage rate in that market inthe next period would lead them to allocate more landto crops with safer returns. A panel data set fromthe ICRISAT survey of the semi-arid areas of India isused for estimation. As a background, we discuss thesurvey villages in detail.

O autorze

Syed Naimul Wadood was born in Bangladesh in 1972. Studied
economics undergraduate at University of Dhaka and obtained Ph.D.
in Economics from North Carolina State University in 2004. Now an
Assistant Professor at University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Principle interests are applied development microeconomics, micro
finance and public policy.