Abstract
Agriculture employs the majority of the labor force in developing countries, and plays a critical role in economic development (Gollin, Lagakos, and Waugh 2014; Herrendorf, Rogerson, and Valentinyi 2014). Most of the global poor live in Sub-Saharan Africa, where agriculture is the dominant income-generating activity, with nearly nine in ten rural households generating income from crop production (Davis, Di Giuseppe, and Zezza 2017; World Bank 2018). Agricultural productivity in the region remains low. Increasing it will be critical to making a meaningful dent in global poverty. Bolstering rates of investment and adoption of improved technology are crucial to this endeavor. Indeed, poverty-reducing agricultural growth in the region is expected to come largely from expanded use of technology, including improved seeds and agro-chemicals (Sheahan and Barrett 2017).
Yet, investment is often costly, particularly for poor households. In the face of imperfections in credit and labor markets, households can face steep trade-offs between current and future production. Low returns to saving and high costs of borrowing make smoothing from one harvest to the next more costly and raise the relative price of consumption at times of the year most distant from the previous harvest (Kaminski, Christiaensen, and Gilbert 2014). This cost is magnified for investments that take relatively longer to yield returns, such as crops with long maturation periods.
One potential way to improve household efficiency is by facilitating communication and coordination of production decisions within the family. We test this hypothesis among couples in rural Côte d’Ivoire. We randomly selected 1,491 (male) lead farmers to receive ~600 (2 ha worth) subsidized high-yield variety rubber seedlings. We randomize wives’ participation in an agricultural extension training for rubber, a slow-maturing crop that requires upfront care. In the without-wife group, households witness an 18.4 percent drop in agricultural productivity. In the group with wife participation, households increase their labor hours and input use—resulting in no drop in overall productivity—and have 20 percent higher investment levels. This impact is not due to improved skills or incentives when wives participate, but rather due to better planning and a reduction in gendered task division. The wife’s presence and participation in the creation of an action plan for rubber cultivation increases her visibility and planned responsibility in rubber production, with a more than three-fold increase in agricultural tasks assigned to her management in the action plan compared to in the individual training.