Tag: productivity

This study examines the impact of access to bank and non-bank credit on rice productivity and output. It employed the coarsened exact matching (CEM) model and qualitative methods for primary data on a purposive sample of 450 rice farmers across three Local Government Areas of Ebonyi State, Nigeria. Pre-matching results suggest that access to non-bank credit and access to total credit significantly affected labour productivity and output, while access to bank credit significantly affected output. However, the post-matching results show that access to all three categories of credit has no significant effect on either output or capital, labour, and total factor productivity. This study therefore recommends that for an improved production and productivity yield among rice farmers in the state, policies should focus on the issues of improved quality of education and constraints in accessing loans/credits.

This study examines the impact of internal and external knowledge on firm productivity in the Swedish agricultural sector. It combines theories from regional economics about the geographical aspects of knowledge with traditional theories on the role of knowledge in productivity in agriculture. The study is a firm-level analysis using an unbalanced panel between the years 2002 and 2011 in Sweden. The results show that these firms are positively affected by employees with formal education related to the sector. Higher knowledge levels have a greater impact than lower levels. External knowledge, such as localised spillovers, is also important, but the results on this factor are more ambiguous.