23.07.2020 - An Elusive Quest? 25 Years of Search for the right Farming Model in post-Soviet Central Asia
| Whether agriculture should be organised in large or small farms matters a lot for the Central Asian countries that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Collective agriculture during Soviet times used to be based on hired labour and was known for its endemic inefficiency. Central Asian governments were generally hesitant to break up the former state and collective farms and slow to establish private property rights. The presentation focuses on the “inverse relation” (IR) between farm size and land productivity and examines how it was affected by land market liberalisation and farm restructuring. The analysis is based on a novel data set collated from official sources representing provincial averages by farm type for Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan for 1992-2014.
The authors Martin Petrick and Nodir Djanibekov use parametric and non-parametric regression to quantify the relationship between farm size and crop yields. They find that within groups of individual and corporate farms, yield levels increase with farm size, so that the IR is rejected. Yield levels between farm types and within households are consistent with conventional arguments supporting the IR. The authors observe a convergence towards productive medium-sized farms due to gradual land market liberalisation. Commercial individual farms endowed with about 100 ha arable land emerge as the most productive farm type, with little scope for productivity-improving land redistribution. |
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Prof. Dr. Martin Petrick gave a seminar talk at the Virtual Seminar Series on Applied Economics and Policy Analysis in Central Asia hosted by Westminster International University in Tashkent (WIUT), International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO). » Further information on the seminar series: http://conference.wiut.uz/ |
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