Essays On Agricultural Productivity Environment And Household Efficiency

Poverty and food security are long-standing concerns for policymakers all over the world, especially those in developing countries. To address this issue, farmers, researchers, and governments have devoted their time and efforts to increasing agricultural productivity and household production efficiency for thousands of years. While technological advancement has played a crucial role in the process, especially since the Green Revolution in the 1960s, environmental stress factors and how to adapt to environmental changes remain a challenge for agricultural production. Technology, crop genetics, and farm management practices may interact in complicated ways affecting crop productivity and farm household efficiency. For example, one potential mechanism to offset the adverse impacts of environmental stressors such as infestation could be through biotechnology, such as genetically engineered biotech crops. But it is less clear how such biotechnology may interfere with crops' ability to deal with weather and climate change stressors. Enhancing agricultural productivity can be done through the appropriate use of agricultural inputs and the adoption of agricultural technologies. Agricultural mechanization services (AMS), as another example, have emerged as a viable and effective solution for helping farmers gain access to machinery equipment in developing countries, overcoming their poor affordability for self-purchase. This dissertation aims to contribute to the understanding of these issues through three essays on agricultural productivity, environment, and household efficiency. It may shed light on the new challenges facing agriculture and rural households and provide insights that are useful to policymakers in designing effective policies to address such challenges. The first essay examines the effects of agricultural mechanization services (AMS) on agricultural productivity. AMS have emerged as a viable solution for helping farmers gain access to machinery equipment in developing countries. The chapter investigates the simultaneous decision-making regarding multiple mechanization services and the causal impacts of AMS on land productivity. The study finds that the ratio of off-farm wage to AMS price has a significant positive effect on AMS adoption, and the sequential adoption of AMS starts with power-intensive, followed by control-intensive production tasks. Furthermore, switching to AMS in plowing, transplanting, and harvesting increases rice yield, while AMS of pesticide spraying significantly decreases yield. The chapter highlights the potential moral hazards associated with AMS when monitoring is costly and suggests that increased AMS adoption can significantly enhance food security in China. The second essay investigates the impact of biotechnology and environmental stressors on agricultural productivity. Despite the widespread adoption of biotech crops in the United States, little is known about their interaction with environmental factors. The chapter utilizes observational data from U.S. county-level agricultural production, along with remotely sensed ozone estimates, to estimate a fixed-effects model with instrumental variables for local ozone concentration. The findings suggest that while biotech adoption reduces yield distribution risks, biotech crops may have a disadvantage in dealing with ozone pollution. The chapter highlights the importance of breeding efforts that consider environmental stress, especially climate change-sensitive factors such as ozone pollution. Improving the welfare of poor people, particularly those living in remote rural areas, is another classic challenge faced by policymakers in less developed countries/communities. Residential relocation is considered a solution for lifting these poor households in remote areas out of the poverty trap. The third essay examines the impact of residential relocation on rural household efficiency. The study uses micro-panel data to investigate the effects of residential relocation on households' allocation and technical efficiency. Results suggest that residential relocation leads to a significant increase in households' allocation efficiency, but it reduces households' technical efficiency. The study identifies disparities in the relocation effects on household efficiency between ethnic minority and Han Chinese households. The results underscore the need to address the negative impacts of residential relocation on agricultural production technology efficiency and the resulting food security issues.