Market Participation and Farm Profitability: The Case of Northern Ghana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines the effect of quantity sold (sales volume) on profitability of market participating smallholder farmers in northern Ghana. Market participation has been shown to be important for increasing incomes and improving production efficiency for farm households but still remains low in SSA. While agribusiness and development experts generally advocate for more intensive market participation, it is not clear if selling more results in more profits for smallholder farmers in remote markets that are prone to exorbitant transaction costs. The data used in this study is from the APS survey conducted in 2013 and 2014 in Northern Ghana which had a sample size of 527. The study is based on the theory of profit maximization, in which separability is inferred from observed market participation. OLS regression is used for empirical estimation after rejecting the hypothesis of endogeneity in the model. Mean gross margin/ kg across four groups of farmers ranked by quantity sold is also statistically examined. The results confirm the existence of economies of scale and also show that different crops have different effects on profitability. The results also show that although unambiguously positive, the relationship between quantity sold and profitability may not be linear.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".