Theories of Agricultural Productivity

AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY

The purpose of this section is to identify and define core agricultural productivity related concepts, including measures of agricultural productivity, theories of productivity while also providing contextual information on the trends in agricultural productivity and related concepts in Nigeria.

DEFINITION AND MEASURES OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY

Agricultural productivity refers to the output produced by a given level of input(s) in the agricultural sector of a given economy (Fulginiti and Perrin 1998). More formally, it can be defined as “the ratio of the value of total farm outputs to the value of total inputs used in farm production” (Olayide and Heady 1982).

Agricultural productivity is measured as the ratio of final output, in appropriate units, to some measure of inputs. However, measures of productivity can be divided into partial or total measures depending on the number of inputs under consideration. Total output as a ratio of some measure of labor quantity, usually man days in developing countries, is called labor productivity (LP) and provides some notion of output per worker; while output per area of land planted is land productivity (Wiebe et al. 2003; Zepeda 2001). The two previously mentioned measures are examples of single factor productivity (SFP), defined as the ratio of a measure of output quantity to the quantity of a single input used (Diewert and Nakamura 2005). Partial measures of productivity can be misleading because they ignore the role of other inputs in any observed output changes (Zepeda 2001). As a result of this shortcoming, a total measure of productivity was developed. Total factor productivity (TFP) is defined as the ratio of a measure of total output quantity to a measure of the quantity of total input (Wiebe et al. 2003; Zepeda 2001). As with labor productivity, most studies on TFP are primarily targeted towards identifying the determinants of TFP in Nigeria (Ukoha et al. 2010; Akintayo 2011; Mbam...