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Agricultural Extension and Imperfect Supervision in Contract Farming: Evidence from Madagascar
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Abstract
This article tests whether agricultural extension and imperfect supervision -- conflated here into the number of visits by a technical assistant -- increase productivity in a sample of contract farming arrangements between a processing �rm and small agricultural producers in Madagascar. Production functions are estimated which treat the number of visits by a technical assistant as an input and which exploit the variation in the number of visits between the contracted crops grown on a given plot by a speci�c grower, thereby accounting for district-, grower-, and plot-level unobserved heterogeneity. Results indicate that the elasticity of yield with respect to the number of visits lies between 1.3 and 1.7.Supervision, Extension, Contract Farming, Grower-Processor Contracts