Book Description

Structural transformation and corresponding labor productivity growth are fundamentals of economic development. This dissertation, titled Structural Transformation from A Microeconomic View, explores the path of the structural transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). In the last 20 years in SSA, structural transformation was not always accompanied by overall labor productivity growth. The first essay of this dissertation, titled Education, Profitability, and Household Labor Allocation in Rural Uganda, explores the microeconomic factors that explain non-growing-productivity structural change with a focus on the role of education. I jointly estimate household hourly profit (wage) and labor supply functions. The estimation result is supportive of the hypothesis that the level of education, profitability of an activity, and time allocation to that activity can be not positively correlated while education positively increases total household profit from the activity. To trigger structural transformation, the governments of SSA and donors have allocated a vast amount of resources into agricultural programs for over 20 years. Aggregate agriculture productivity, however, has shown little growth in the last 20 years. Yet the share of employment in agriculture has constantly decreased since 2000. Whether agriculture productivity growth advances the labor shift from the agriculture sector to the non-agriculture sector is still an open question and of great interest for efficient investment in agriculture development and the economic growth of the countries. The second essay, titled Land and Labor Bias of Farm Technology and the Household's Labor Allocation Decisions, explores the effect of land- and labor-augmenting farm technologies on the household's labor decisions. I provide a theoretical model to describe the household responses to land- and labor-augmenting farm technical change. I classify agricultural households into six regimes based on the participation in on- and off-farm labor markets and the constraint of off-farm work opportunities. I derive propositions to examine the behaviors of the households in each regime. In the empirical part of the study, I apply the model to microeconomic data from Tanzania to test the propositions. The estimation results show that for Tanzanian maize farmers, the adoption of land-augmenting technology, that is organic fertilizer, inorganic fertilizer, or irrigation, increases on-farm labor and decreases off-farm labor while the adoption of labor-augmenting technology, including sprayers, pesticides, herbicides, animal traction, or tractors, decreases on-farm labor and increases off-farm labor when the elasticity of substitution between labor and land is sufficiently large. Taken together, these essays shed light on important policy implications for the acceleration of structural transformation in SSA. The estimation result from the first essay suggests that the expansion of the industry in which higher levels of education increase profitability of work would pull laborers from farming into nonfarm activities. Relaxing the labor market constraints of individuals, especially from relatively less educated households, would shift hours of labor allocation from less profitable activities towards more profitable activities. Also, raising household incomes or standard of living would increase the preference of individuals for leisure relative to income, and increase the optimal marginal productivity of labor, and consequently the profitability of labor. The second essay provides evidence that depending on the conditions of a country such as the level of elasticity of substitution between land and labor and the constraints around off-farm work opportunities, labor-augmenting agricultural technologies have a good potential for speeding up the structural transformation.