Can peers improve agricultural revenue?

By Tisorn Songsermsawas, Kathy Baylis, Ashwini Chhatre, Hope Michelson
World Development | June 2016

DOI

doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2016.01.023

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Citation

Songsermsawas, Tisorn., Baylis, Kathy., Chhatre, Ashwini., Michelson, Hope. Can peers improve agricultural revenue? World Development doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2016.01.023.

World Development, 2016

Abstract

Crop revenues vary greatly among farmers and the source of that variation is not fully understood, even after controllingfor factors including input use, technology adoption, and other agro-climatic factors. One hypothesis that may explain the variation inoutcomes among farmers is differential access to information through peers. Using a household survey from India containing detailedinformation about personal relationships, we estimate peer effects on cash crop revenue using a novel spatial econometric technique tocontrol for reflection. Our results show that 60% of farmers’ revenue is explained by peers. Peer effects are particularly large in pesticideuse and in the cultivation of a new crop. However, peer effects in input expenditures and land allocation cannot fully explain thevariation in revenue, implying peers may also associate with management, negotiation, and marketing. We find that peer effects aresignificant among farmers’ self-reported peers, especially among those peers who are farmers’ main advisors for agricultural matters.Although caste-based networks (both within the same and in adjacent villages) are important, their effect is smaller than that ofself-reported peer networks. We empirically rule out that our effects are driven by other factors such as geographically correlatedunobservables, farmers following a lead farmer or economies of scale. Our findings speak to both the potential and the limitations ofpeers as sources of agricultural information, and highlight the need for future research about how to best integrate peers into agriculturalextension.

Ashwini Chhatre is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Bharti Institute of Public Policy (BIPP) at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Professor Chhatre is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests broadly centre on the dynamic cross-scale interactions between governance, economic development, and environmental protection. He relocated to India from the US in 2014 to join the faculty at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He spent 13 years in the US, including five in graduate school at Duke University, where he was awarded a PhD in Political Science. In 2006-07, Professor Chhatre became the first Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science at Harvard University, before joining the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

Between completing his BA in Economics from the University of Delhi in 1990 and starting his PhD at Duke University, he spent 11 years working in different parts of India, primarily as a community organiser and social activist on issues related to natural resources such as land, forests, and water. A background in Economics, graduate training in Political Science, and a long-standing engagement with scholarship in Geography, Anthropology, Landscape Ecology, and Environmental History ensure that his research is never confined to a single discipline.

Professor Chhatre’s main research interests lie in exploring the intersection of democracy, environment, and development, with a focus on decentralised forest governance, climate change vulnerability and adaptation, and multifunctional agriculture. Over the past 20 years, the scope of his research projects has ranged from household-level to global analysis, consistently bridging research, policy, and practice.

He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of World Development Perspectives (2016-19), served as Senior Editor of Conservation Letters (2009-2014), and has published one book and several articles in leading journals including Science, and PNAS.

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