Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany.
PLoS One. 2022 Sep 9;17(9):e0274048. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0274048. eCollection 2022.
Roughly one-fifth of the global population is affected by poor visual acuity. Despite the fact that inhabitants of rural areas in low-income countries are most distressed by this, no prior research has studied the impact of poor visual acuity on the economic performance of farms. We conduct a standardized eye test with 288 farm managers in rural Cambodia and find that around 30 percent of our sample suffers from poor visual acuity in terms of nearsightedness (myopia). Our analyses indicate a statistically significant and economically meaningful association of poor visual acuity with economic farm performance. Our results show that gross margins for cropping activities per year could be, on average, around 630 USD higher if farm managers were able to correct for poor vision. Our results suggest that poor visual acuity impairs farm managers from tapping the full potential of their business, which in turn decreases their chance to break the vicious cycle of poverty.
全球约有五分之一的人口受到视力不佳的影响。尽管事实上，低收入国家农村地区的居民受此影响最为严重，但之前没有研究探讨过视力不佳对农场经济绩效的影响。我们在柬埔寨农村地区对 288 名农场经理进行了标准化的视力测试，发现我们的样本中约有 30%的人存在近视（近视）导致的视力不佳。我们的分析表明，视力不佳与经济农场绩效之间存在统计学上显著且具有经济意义的关联。我们的研究结果表明，如果农场经理能够矫正视力不佳，每年的种植业毛利润平均可能会高出约 630 美元。我们的研究结果表明，视力不佳会削弱农场经理充分发挥其业务潜力的能力，进而降低他们摆脱贫困恶性循环的机会。
