Scaling Agricultural Policy Interventions / Lauren F. Bergquist, Benjamin Faber, Thibault Fally, Matthias Hoelzlein, Edward Miguel, Andrés Rodríguez-Clare.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bergquist, Lauren F.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Faber, Benjamin.

Fally, Thibault.

Hoelzlein, Matthias.

Miguel, Edward.

Rodríguez-Clare, Andrés.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w30704.

NBER working paper series no. w30704

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2022.

Summary:

Policies aimed at raising agricultural productivity have been a centerpiece in the fight against global poverty. Their impacts are often measured using field or quasi-experiments that provide strong causal identification, but may be too small-scale to capture the general equilibrium (GE) effects that emerge once the policy is scaled up. We propose a new approach for quantifying large-scale GE policy counterfactuals that can both complement and be informed by evidence from field and quasi-experiments. We develop a quantitative model of farm production, consumption and trading that captures important features of this setting, and propose a new solution method that relies on rich but widely available microdata. We showcase our approach in the context of a subsidy for modern inputs in Uganda, using variation from field and quasi-experiments for parameter estimation. We find that both the average and distributional impacts of the subsidy differ meaningfully when comparing a local intervention to one at scale, even for the same sample of farmers, and quantify the underlying mechanisms. We further document new insights on how GE forces differ as a function of saturation rates at different geographical scales, and on the importance of capturing a granular economic geography for counterfactual analysis.

Notes:

Print version record

December 2022.