Group heterogeneity and the economic effect of farmer organisation participation: Empirical evidence from Taiwan
研究了台湾农民参与不同类型农民组织对经济绩效的影响，发现成员专业和产销活动更同质的组织能显著提高农场销售收入和净收益，且参与多个组织能累积社会资本带来递增回报。
Abstract We explore the effects of different farmer organisations on smallholder farmers' economic performance. The average treatment effect of switching between different farmer organisations is examined. In addition, based on the premise that a higher level of social capital is accumulated through participation in multiple farmer organisations, we also investigate how the economic consequences of farmer organisation membership vary with the intensity of participation. Our conceptual model explicitly includes social capital to provide a micro‐foundation and a theoretical justification for the linkage between farmer organisation participation and the economic outcome. This indicates that participating in different types of farmer organisations is beneficial for farm households only when the returns from social capital investment outweigh the time cost of participation. Our empirical results suggest that membership of farmer organisations that are more homogeneous in terms of member specialty and similarity in production and marketing activities results in a significant increase in farm sales revenue and net returns. This result supports the view that technological proximity accentuates knowledge spillovers within the farmer organisations, and thus leads to better economic outcomes. In line with the prediction of the theoretical model, the average treatment effect of participation is found to increase with the number of organisations that farmers belong to. Moreover, results from the quantile regression provide empirical evidence supporting increasing returns to social capital accumulated through participation in several farmer organisations.