PRICE INCENTIVES, NON-PRICE FACTORS, AND AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA: A COINTEGRATION ANALYSIS

This paper deals with the question of how responsive farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are to changes in incentives. Employing Johansen's multivariate cointegration approach and covering the period 1965-99, it investigates for ten selected SSA countries the long-run effect of pricing policies,macroeconomic distortions, and certain non-price factors on agricultural production. I turns out that - in those cases where cointegration relationships are found - estimated supply elasticities tend to lie between 0.20 and 0.50. Among the non-price factors, drought episodes have significantly impaired agricultural growth in six out of ten sample countries. Technical progress as measured by a simple deterministic trend has only had a minor impact on output