Farm Productivity and Commercial Agriculture: Evidence from a Stochastic Frontier Analysis in Six Sub-Saharan African Countries
This paper examines whether farm-level commercialization and local intermediary density are associated with improvements in technical efficiency—that is, the extent to which producers operate close to their production frontier given available inputs.
High Value Crop Commercialization and Women’s Empowerment in Sub-Saharan Africa: Panel Insights Reinforced by Double Machine Learning and Quasi-Experiments
We examine how agricultural commercialization relates to women’s empowerment across Ethiopia, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, and Nigeria using LSMS-ISA household panels (2010–2020), a modified A-WEAI (5DE), two-way fixed effects, Double Machine Learning, and propensity-score matched difference-in-differences. Entry into markets (extensive margin) is consistently associated positively with empowerment where identification is strongest: PSM-DiD shows noticeable gains when households begin selling any crops—especially in Ethiopia, Malawi, Tanzania and Nigeria—and positive correlations when existing sellers add cash crops to sales in Malawi (Ethiopia marginal).