Gender Differentials and Determinants of Female- Male Holders Revenue Efficiency during the implementation of the GTP plan in Ethiopia: A Panel Data Study

In Ethiopia, the participation of women in agriculture is high, women farmers provide around 50 percent of the total labor time required for crop production in most parts of the country (Ahmed, 2013). Even though, the presence of the women in the agriculture sector in Ethiopia is very significant in numbers, a 2014 World Bank report affirms that female farmers benefit less from economic growth because they are less productive than their male counter parts. According to the report the gender productivity gap in Ethiopia is one of the highest in sub-Sahara Africa (World Bank 2014). Therefore, the need to have a closer look to the female holder farms, to locate the sources of inefficiency in hopes to contribute to the alleviation of the poverty conditions that the country faces by improved economic performance. The hypothesis I test in the paper is that in Ethiopia, women are more efficient than men in terms of revenue efficiency in absence of price discrimination in the markets. This study used a two-stage performance assessment across 581 farm holders’ information obtained from the comparable Living Standard Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys (LSMS-ISA) from 2011-2012 and 2013-2014. In the first stage of the study, the revenue efficiency scores, and scale efficiency scores of female and male headed households were calculated by using Data Envelop Analysis (DEA). In the second stage we employed a Panel Tobit Analysis to identify possible determinants of the farms’ inefficiency by including in the model variables related to the farmers' personal characteristics, farms’ characteristics, households’ characteristics, and managerial characteristics.