Sustainable Land Management Practices and Gender Differentials in Agricultural Productivity

This paper examines the heterogeneous effects of sustainable land management practices (SLMPs) on productivity and productivity gap among female and male farm managers. It uses data from a number of districts in northern Ethiopia where some of the most important SLMPs–soil and water conservation, crop-legume diversification, and agroforestry are commonly practiced. Heterogeneous effect analysis and decomposition methods were primarily used to estimate productivity differences and gender gap in productivity. Overall, we find that female managers had 15.2% lower productivity; and this gap increased with the use of SLMPs. After controlling for labor, non-labor inputs and other characteristics, we find that subsamples of SLMPs generated higher productivity gaps, asserting their important role in enhancing productivity. While earlier studies documented the dominant effect of differences in access to inputs, we find in contrast that unequal returns to inputs or unobserved heterogeneity largely explains not only mean productivity but also productivity differences at various percentiles. This result is consistent with documentation in the wider literature that unequal access to inputs does not fully explain productivity differences, indicating the important role of unequal returns to inputs in widening or closing the gender gap in productivity. Assessment of the gender gap from different perspectives in this paper points to not only promoting the use of SLMPs but also emphasize the need for policy to focus on bridging unequal returns to productive inputs.