Education: a key to women's agricultural productivity in Cambodia

As women comprise a larger share of land managers, it is important to discern factors that limit their success. Using nationally representative data from Cambodia we compare factors associated with productivity among female headed households as opposed to male headed households. OLS regressions show that household size, education, vocational training, land area, an index of non-agricultural capital, and the income share from agriculture are positively related to all types of agricultural revenue. However, when we use a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to separately consider revenue from crop production and rice production (as opposed to animal husbandry) we see that after the primacy of land access, the years of education are the next most important, and that differences between endowments explain all of the difference between male and female-headed households. We conclude that there are high returns to investment in education for girls and women in Cambodian agriculture.