Contract Farming and Causal Inference

I am excited to announce that Marc Bellemare and I have a new paper out in World Development. It is a review of the contract farming literature in developing countries. In the review we do three things. First, we briefly introduce the institution of contract farming in developing countries. Second, we review evidence from the literature on the question: “Does contract farming improve welfare?” and find that, in terms of present-day standards for credible causal inference, the ability of policy-makers to learn much from this literature is relatively low. Finally, we discuss where the literature on contract farming should focus itself in the future.

Here is a link to the article, entitled: “Does Contract Farming Improve Welfare? A Review“. If you do work on contract farming or the structural transformation in developing countries, I hope that you find this article helpful.