Bibliographical Note to Chapter 9

Much of the literature about data collection procedures and strategies is unpublished or has received only limited circulation. Perhaps the most widely available source dealing with farm budget compilation is Maxwell L. Brown, Farm Budgets: From Farm Income Analysis to Agricultural Project Analysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). The organization of farm budget information is discussed in C. Peter Timmer, Walter P. Falcon, and Scott R. Pearson, Food Policy Analysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), chap. 3. Two other documents, reflecting substantial experience with field surveys and interview techniques, have been published by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), Planning Techniques Appropriate to Farmers: Concepts and Procedures (Mexico City: CIMMYT, 1980), and Richard K. Perrin et al., "From Agronomic Data to Farmer Recommendations: An Economics Training Manual" (Mexico City: CIMMYT, 1976).

One criterion by which to identify representative systems is regional variation. The existence of intraregional differences with respect to farm size remains a controversial empirical issue. Most explanations for farm size differences rely on the presence of an imperfect labor market that causes systematic variation in the opportunity costs of this input. The issue is discussed in R. Albert Berry and W. R. Cline, Agrarian Structure and Productivity in Developing Countries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). Additional explanations of differential productivity, related to the availability of credit and the supervision of hired labor, are developed in Gershon Feder, "The Relation between Farm Size and Farm Productivity," Journal of Development Economics, 18 (August 1985): 297-313.

Other applications of farm modeling, such as partial budgeting, are discussed in Brown, Farm Budgets. An application of partial budgeting to the analysis of technological change is provided in Charles P. Humphreys and Scott R. Pearson, "Choice of Technique in Sahelian Rice Production," Food Research Institute Studies 17 (1979-1980): 235-77.

PAMs are most commonly used for evaluating single commodity systems, and the farm is assumed to be made up of separable crop production functions. But decisions about one crop may affect decisions about another crop; this interdependence is termed jointness, and its implications are explored in Richard Just and David Zilberman, "Multicrop Production Functions," American Journal of Agricultural Economics ₆₅ (November 1983): 780-90; and C. Shumway, R. Pope, and E. Nash, "Allocatable Fixed Inputs and Jointness in Agricultural Production: Implications for Economic Modeling," American Journal of Agricultural Economics ₆₆ (February 1984): 72-78. Whole farm models of farms are described in J. Price Gittinger, Economic Analysis of Agricultural Projects_, 2d ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), chap. 4. An application of whole farm analysis that utilizes the PAM approach is provided by Roger Fox and Timothy J. Finan, "Patterns of Technical Change in the Northwest," in Scott R. Pearson et al., Portuguese Agriculture in Transition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 187-201.