The Role of Agricultural Extension Programs On Crop Farming Technical Efficiency

Abstract Extension services have become the gold standard for agricultural development programs to spur farm productivity and enhance farmers’ livelihood. Scholars from distinct strands of research have contested the virtues of these programs as systematic reviews failed to disentangle the different causal paths. We aim to unpack the relationship between these two constructs, and more specifically explore the main determinants causing systematic variabilities of the technical efficiency estimates from well-known published crop-farming studies. A meta-regression analysis is implemented by collating 335 observations from 199 farm-level studies to review the direct impact of agricultural extension activities on farming performance. While the implementation of expansion programs tends to be non-randomly distributed in our sample, we employ the inverse probability of treatment weighting to correct for potential selection bias. The absence of a publication bias in found studies our meta-analysis is empirically identified. Our empirical findings are robust when multiple imputation method is employed to mitigate the missingness of observations. Consonant with the theory of agricultural extension, we find that extension significantly improves technical efficiency by 4.8% to 7.6%. Farm productivity significantly differs in country level characteristics, type of crops and model specification.JEL Classification: Q16, O18, C14, C29