Collaborative Research: Understanding the productivity of the world's most numerous firms: evidence from surveys and satellites

职务名称：了解世界上数量最多的公司的生产率：来自调查和卫星的证据为什么有些公司比其他公司更有生产力？ 近世纪来，这一直是经济学的一个中心问题，它的答案对社会的长期福祉以及政府政策如何促进这种福祉具有影响。 在这个项目中，我们将研究世界上最常见的企业类型：家庭农场。 我们的研究重点是非洲的农场，这些农场雇佣了世界上很大一部分人。真可怜。 详细了解这些公司的生产力--是否以及为什么有些公司比其他公司更有生产力？将有助于为设计政策干预提供基础，这些政策干预可以提高其整体生产力，从而提高世界上许多最贫困人口的收入。 与美国卫星公司合作，我们还将根据卫星图像对农业生产力进行新的估计，并将这些数据提供给研究人员和政策制定者。 从这项研究的结果有政策的影响，提高小企业的生产力，从而减少世界各地的贫困，包括在美国，我们提出的工作的目标是表征的规模和生产力分散在家庭拥有的农场，在世界上最常见的企业类型和世界上大多数穷人的雇主的来源。 发达国家的公司对生产力分散进行了深入研究，但令人惊讶的是，对穷国生产力分散的时间和空间模式知之甚少。 了解农业企业之间生产力差距的大小和来源-以前由于缺乏数据而难以研究-将填补现有生产力文献中的一个巨大空白。 我们建议通过结合两个新的数据来源来在这个问题上取得进展：世界银行目前正在多个非洲国家进行的一套越来越多的高质量家庭小组调查，以及对东非土地生产力的全新高分辨率卫星估计。 这两个数据来源相结合，将使我们能够评估农业企业的程式化的事实，已建立的制造业和零售企业：是否生产率分散在企业之间是大的和持久的，是否公司进入和退出与生产率相关，以及是否有选择的退出和进入是一个重要来源的总生产率增长的农业部门。 将在9个非洲国家进行分析。

Title: Understanding the productivity of the world's most numerous firms: evidence from surveys and satellitesWhy are some firms more productive than others? This has been a central question in economics for nearly a century, and its answer has implications for the long term well-being of societies, and for how government policy can promote this well-being. In this project we will study the most common firm type in the world: the family-owned farm. Our research focuses on farms in Africa, which employ a large share of the world?s poor. A detailed understanding the productivity of these firms -- whether and why some firms are more productive than others ? will help provide the foundation for designing policy interventions that could improve their overall productivity, and thus lift incomes for many of the world's poorest. Working with US satellite companies, we will also generate new estimates of agricultural productivity based on satellite imagery, and make these data available to both researchers and policymakers. Results from this research has policy implications for increasing the productivity of small businesses and thus reduce poverty throughout the world, including in the U.S. The goal of our proposed work is to characterize the size and sources of productivity dispersion across family owned farms, the most common firm type in the world and the employer of a majority of the world's poor. Productivity dispersion has been well studied among firms in the developed world, but surprisingly little is known about the temporal and spatial patterns of productivity dispersion in poor countries. Understanding the size and source of productivity gaps among agricultural firms -- previously difficult to study due to lack of data -- would fill a large gap in the existing productivity literature. We propose to make progress on this question by combining two newly-available sources of data: a growing set of high-quality household panel surveys currently underway by the World Bank in multiple African countries, and brand-new high-resolution satellite-based estimates of land productivity in Eastern Africa. These two data sources, in combination, will allow us to evaluate for agricultural firms the stylized facts that have been established for manufacturing and retail firms: whether productivity dispersion across firms is large and persistent, whether firm entry and exit are correlated with productivity, and whether selective exit and entry are an important source of aggregate productivity growth within the agricultural sector. Analysis will be conducted across nine African countries.