The study investigates the effect of the spouse's access to financial services (credit or savings) through membership in a self-help group on adopting technology, technical efficiency, and managerial gaps. To estimate the empirical model, we use farm-level data from rice farming households in eastern India, propensity score matching method, and selectivity-corrected stochastic production frontier. Results show that families with access to financial services via a spouse's membership in self-help groups have slightly higher technical efficiency than their counterparts. Both technology and managerial gaps are higher for farms where spouses have access to financial services via SHGs than their counterparts. With access to financial services via spouses, rice farmers used more hired labor, about 1.3 person-days/ha for crop establishment. Thus, women joining self-help groups can increase farm productivity, and extension agents should also focus on spouses and their role in farming decision-making, not just financial management.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.