AEA RC T Registr y

The American Economic Association's registry for randomized controlled trials

This project proposes to support the work of the Government of Punjab, Pakistan, overall, and the Ministry of Agriculture in particular, in their effort to improve service delivery through improved systems of client outreach and higher quality service provision by public sector employees. For the Ministry of Agriculture, this entails improving the performance of all staff providing advisory services to farmers—in particular, field staff, who are on the front lines of this effort.

Over the last year, all field staff -- Agriculture Extension Officers (AOs), Agriculture Assistants (AIs), and Field Assistants (FAs) – have been provided a smartphone equipped with a monitoring system (Agri-Smart) to track their location and activities. The Ministry of Agriculture is now putting in place performance based pay incentives using the Agri-Smart system, to reward greater outreach efforts by field staff. The goal is to improve agricultural productivity which is seen as critical for both poverty reduction and growth.

Agricultural service delivery involves complex tasks where effort is multi-dimensional with some dimensions harder to monitor than others. This is a setting where the choice is unclear between the known advantages and disadvantages of objective versus subjective performance evaluation systems. Further, since bias is a common issue in all subjective evaluation systems, there is a potential benefit for increased monitoring of supervisors themselves.

We proposed to the Ministry of Agriculture to evaluate the impact of three alternative performance pay systems which vary in terms of objectivity and alignment of staff incentives with the Directorate.

2017-11-01

2019-01-31

1. Ag Extension worker level outcomes:
a. Outreach measures as measure by the Agri-Smart such as Compliance,
Distance traveled, Farmers reached, Total farmers advised through extension activities in a given month, Proportion of scheduled activities completed; proportion of time spent on extension activities in a given month, Number village visits
b. Job satisfaction, Perception of fairness, Collaboration with colleagues as measured in a survey

2. Farmer level data
a. Farmer feedback on extension services,
b. Farmer Technology adoption
c. Farmer knowledge
d. Agricultural Productivity

3. Tehsil level data
Agricultural productivity, Yield for all major and minor crops.

We proposed to the Ministry of Agriculture to evaluate the impact of three alternative performance pay systems which vary in terms of objectivity and alignment of staff incentives with the Directorate.

Our impact evaluation covers the entire population of field agricultural extension agents (FAs/AIs/AOs) in Punjab:
126 tehsils, with approximatively 20 workers per tehsil.

We randomized the incentive schemes at the tehsil level.

Randomization done in office by a computer.
We stratified by districts.
We make a 100 draws for the allocation and for each draw run the following tests: A. that treatments are balanced across some baseline variables and B. that for each sub-sample of our treatments, we run a joint test of significance for all the variable vars.
We choose the draw with the smallest joint F.

Tehsil level

Yes

126 tehsils

126 tehsils with about 2,524 workers (out of which 382 are AOs)

T1: 31 tehsils
T2: 31 tehsils
T3: 32 tehsils
Control: 32 tehsils