Role of Women in Improving Productivity and Efficiency of Rice: Evidence from India

Women’s contributions to agriculture are an essential factor in achieving food security in developing countries. In rice production, women’s involvement is usually limited to their labor participation. Differences in gender roles within the household hinder women from accessing productive resources and services compared to their male counterparts, leading to a gender gap in rice productivity. With the steady growth of rice productivity experienced in eastern India, it is essential to reduce the gender gap by providing women equal access to resources. However, there is little information on how the gender gap can be addressed between married couples in a patriarchal family structure like India. This dissertation analyzes the potential impact on rice productivity and input use when the spouse (wife) in the household has given access to resources (e.g., rice variety and credit). The first chapter analyzes the impact of a married couple’s decision-making strategy in choosing rice varieties on rice productivity and input use using an endogenous switching regression. The second chapter estimates the effect of access to financial services on technical efficiency using a stochastic production frontier framework. The last chapter evaluates how joint decision-making strategy influences the inverse relationship between farm size and rice productivity following a yield approach and quantile regression. The findings show that joint decision-making strategy choice leads to a higher rice yield and fertilizer usage while lower labor requirements. Regarding spouse access to financial resources, results show a significant difference in technological and managerial gaps. However, that households with access have a lower predicted rice yield than households without access. The last chapter shows that joint decision-making in the family still left the inverse relationship unchanged in examining the inverse relationship. The dissertation provides two significant implications. First, results provide evidence of gender-differentiated preferences for rice variety within the household that can affect rice productivity and input use. Second, the spouse’s access to credit does not necessarily lead to an increase in rice productivity. Thus, determining the primary purpose of why households avail financial services would be essential in analyzing its impact on productivity to avoid misleading results.