Agricultural Cooperatives and Investment in Organic Soil Amendments and Chemical Fertilizer in China
研究中国苹果种植户加入合作社如何影响其对有机土壤改良剂和化肥的投资决策，发现合作社成员身份显著提高了有机土壤改良剂的投资概率。
Abstract In this article, we develop a dynamic model to show how membership in agricultural cooperatives influences smallholder farmers' decisions to invest in organic soil amendments and chemical fertilizer. The model considers management decisions of heterogonous producers within an intertemporal framework, with the decision to join the cooperative assumed to be endogenous. Farm‐level data of apple farmers from three provinces in China are used to estimate the impact of cooperative membership on investment in organic soil amendments and chemical fertilizer. A recursive bivariate probit model that accounts for potential endogeneity of cooperative membership and selection bias is employed in the empirical analysis. The empirical results show that cooperative membership exerts a positive and statistically significant impact on the likelihood of investing in organic soil amendments. The findings also reveal that tenure security, human capital, farm size, and access to credit positively and significantly influence the probability of a farmer joining a cooperative and the likelihood of investing in soil quality measures.