Farm size, household size and composition, and women's contribution to agricultural production: Evidence from Zaire
利用扎伊尔农户数据，检验了Binswanger和McIntire关于热带农业的若干命题，发现女性对农场规模的边际贡献大于男性，但仅在较大家庭中显著；家庭规模增加导致人均耕种面积下降，可能与激励问题和家庭活动多样化有关。
This article examines a unique data set on peasant farms in Zaire, focusing on several of the propositions regarding land‐abundant tropical agriculture recently set forth by Binswanger and McIntire. In an environment fairly comparable to their base case, we find empirical support for their contentions concerning the virtual universality of self‐cultivation, the limited extent of hiring of labour, and the importance for farm size of the household's age‐sex composition. Women's contribution to farm size at the margin is larger than that of men, although this difference is apparent only among larger households. Our results differ somewhat from the Binswanger‐McIntire proposition that area cultivated per working household member will be largely invariant to household size or wealth. There is a decline in cultivated area per worker as household size increases that may reflect incentive problems as well as a tendency toward greater diversification of household activities as household size increases. Wealthy households have relatively large cultivated areas, probably as a consequence of the existence of greater access to external output markets than was assumed in the Binswanger—McIntire base case. Notes Department of Economics, The Pennsylvania State University. The Zaire Agricultural Sector Studies Project, a joint effort funded by the US Agency for International Development (Project 660–0070) and the Government of Zaire, collected the data analysed in this article. This research was supported in part by a grant from The Hewlett Foundation to the Population Issues Research Center at The Pennsylvania State University. Helpful comments on earlier versions of this article were provided by Hans Binswanger, Howard Elliott, John Mclntire, Mark Roberts, Sharon Shapiro, Emmanuel Skoufias, John Strauss, Tshikala Tshibaka, and an anonymous referee. Responsibility for the contents of this article rests solely with the author.