Economics Research Branch, Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute, Belfast, United Kingdom.
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Abuja, Nigeria.
PLoS One. 2021 Jan 22;16(1):e0245426. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0245426. eCollection 2021.
The formation of agricultural cooperatives has been widely promoted as an agricultural development policy initiative to help smallholder farmers cope with multiple production and marketing challenges. Using a nationally representative survey dataset of smallholder maize producers from rural Nigeria, this study assesses the impact of agricultural cooperative membership on technical efficiency (TE). We based our estimation approach on the combination of a newly developed sample selection stochastic production frontier model with propensity score matching to control for possible selectivity biases from both observables and unobservables. We estimate stochastic meta-frontiers to examine TE differences between cooperative members and non-members. Our results reveal that TE levels of members are consistently higher than that of non-members. This calls for continued policy incentives targeted at encouraging farmers to form as well as participate in agricultural cooperatives.
农业合作社的形成作为一种农业发展政策举措得到了广泛推广，旨在帮助小农应对多种生产和营销挑战。本研究利用来自尼日利亚农村的小规模玉米生产者的全国代表性调查数据集，评估了农业合作社成员身份对技术效率（TE）的影响。我们的估计方法基于新开发的样本选择随机生产前沿模型与倾向得分匹配的结合，以控制来自可观察和不可观察因素的可能选择性偏差。我们估计随机超前沿，以检验成员与非成员之间的 TE 差异。我们的结果表明，成员的 TE 水平始终高于非成员。这需要继续制定有针对性的政策激励措施，鼓励农民组建和参与农业合作社。
