Agricultural Commercialisation and Food Security in Rural Economies: Malawian Experience

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes to the debate on the nutrition-related outcomes of cash crop adoption by using a model with essential heterogeneity and a semi-parametric estimation technique. The model explicitly frames non-separability between production and consumption decisions of farming households providing an original test of separability. The empirical application is run using Malawian data. The results imply rational anticipations and decision process of agrarian households relative to the crop portfolio choice, disparate strength of market barriers faced by the farmers, non-separability between production and consumption decisions and a weak transmission from agricultural incomes to higher food expenditures and better diet.

Acknowledgements

The data and code are available on request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Less than 1 per cent of the Malawian households plant only cash crops.

2. By construction, follows a uniform distribution over [0;1].

3. Under controlled/standardised income and price variations across the population.

4. See Heckman et al. (2006) for derivation.

5. Unconditional on .

6. The full support requirement is the strongest in regard to the estimation: values arbitrary close to 0 and 1 are needed; the estimation of and is less demanding, requiring only some positive P(Z) and the values close to 0 and 1 respectively (Heckman & Vytlacil, 2000).

7. Note that as specified in Section 2, food expenditures are adjusted for differences in price levels across regions and locations.

Additional information

Funding

Computing resources used for this work are provided by the American University High Performance Computing System, which is funded in part by the National Science Foundation (BCS-1039497) see www.american.edu/cas/hpc for information on the system and its uses.