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State-trading enterprises and productivity: Farm-level evidence from Canadian agriculture

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  • Cardwell, Ryan
  • Ghazalian, Pascal L.

Abstract

The Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) was a state-trading enterprise that controlled the sale and distribution of wheat and barley produced in Western Canada from 1935 to 2012. The CWB’s regulatory and bureaucratic structures have been investigated as sources of several market effects, including prices and spatial production patterns. We investigate the effects of the CWB on productivity using farm-level data, and identify how deregulation of the CWB affected total factor productivity (TFP) for CWB-regulated crops. Farm-level production and input data for 13,000 grain farms over 15 years are used to generate a within-farm difference-in-difference (DiD) estimator that identifies how relative TFP changed between CWB and non-CWB crops after deregulation. Cereal farm operators typically grow several (CWB and non-CWB) crops in a single season, allowing us to estimate production functions for multiple crops at the same farm in the same year. Our within-farm DiD empirical strategy identifies the effects of deregulation on changes in relative TFP between crops, while controlling for many of the confounding factors that complicate TFP measurement in other approaches, such as unobserved differences between farms and unobserved changes within farms over time. This research makes a methodological contribution to the productivity literature by developing a within-farm DiD estimator, and contributes to the understanding of how policy interventions affect farm-level productivity.

Suggested Citation

  • Cardwell, Ryan & Ghazalian, Pascal L., 2022. "State-trading enterprises and productivity: Farm-level evidence from Canadian agriculture," 96th Annual Conference, April 4-6, 2022, K U Leuven, Belgium 321159, Agricultural Economics Society - AES.
    • Handle: RePEc:ags:aesc22:321159
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.321159
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
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    Keywords

    Agricultural and Food Policy; Crop Production/Industries; Production Economics;
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