Keijiro Otsuka

Kobe University | Shindai · Faculty of Economics

The main purpose of this book is to provide an appropriate strategy for realizing a rice Green Revolution in SSA with a special focus on the role of training and other complementary strategies, comprising the diffusion of power tillers, the expansion of irrigated areas, and the quality improvement of milled rice. Through the research presented here...

Given that the rice Green Revolution involves adopting management-intensive production practices, the role of extension is critically important to its realization in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This chapter reviews the existing literature on the role of extension services, examines their effectiveness, and identifies challenges in advancing the resea...

The time is ripe to pursue a Green Revolution in rice in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as a means of promoting food security and poverty reduction. This is partly because rice is an up-and-coming crop in this region, and partly because, as will be demonstrated in this volume, we have now accumulated deep knowledge about rice cultivation in SSA. With the...

It is critically important to intensify farming systems in sub-Saharan Africa by disseminating improved agronomic practices and increasing the application of modern inputs (Chaps. 1 and 2 of this volume). One of the region’s challenges is that proper land preparation is difficult due to the scarcity of draft animals and the underdevelopment of the...

Technological innovation is vital to economic growth and food security in sub-Saharan Africa where agricultural productivity has been stagnant for a long time. Extension services and learning from peer farmers are two common approaches to facilitate the diffusion of new technologies, but little is known about their relative effectiveness. Selection...

During the past decade, investments in large-scale irrigation development in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have re-emerged. Given past experiences, this revival is not without controversy. This chapter examines whether large-scale irrigation construction in SSA is economically viable by estimating how much it would cost if the Mwea Irrigation Scheme in...

Countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) rely heavily on imported rice from Asia that is of superior quality compared to local rice. The objective of this study is to assess the impacts of the adoption of improved milling technologies and the associated structural transformation of the rice value chain from 2011 to 2019 using the original census of th...

Countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) rely heavily on imported rice from Asia that is of superior quality relative to local rice. The objectives of this study are to assess the impacts of the adoption of improved milling technologies and the associated structural transformation of the rice value chain from 2011 to 2019 using the original census of...

During the past decade, investments in large-scale irrigation development in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have come back. Given past experiences, this revival is controversial. This paper examines whether large-scale irrigation construction in SSA is economically viable by estimating how much it would cost if the Mwea Irrigation Scheme in Kenya, one of...

During the past decade, investments in large-scale irrigation development in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have come back. Given past experiences, this revival is controversial. This paper examines whether large-scale irrigation construction in SSA is economically viable by estimating how much it would cost if the Mwea Irrigation Scheme in Kenya, one of...

It is critically important to intensify farming systems in sub‐Saharan Africa by disseminating improved agronomic practices and increasing the application of modern inputs. One of the region's problems is that proper land preparation is difficult due to the scarcity of draft animals and the underdevelopment of the tractor rental market. Our analysi...

Improving the productivity of smallholder farms in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) offers the best chance of reducing poverty among this generation of rural poor, by building on the few resources farming households already own. It is also the best and shortest path to meet rising food needs. Using examples from farmers’ maize and rice fields, comparisons...

Information spillovers from multinational enterprises to local firms in developing countries are examined in the literature on global value chains and foreign direct investment. However, the both global value chain and foreign direct investment studies are carried out independently and separately. While global value chain studies describe an import...

The main reason for the success of the 20th century Green Revolution in Asia was the development of large-scale irrigation projects. But, since the late 1990s, these investments were out of the development agenda, partly because the success of the Green Revolution reduced the need for such irrigation development and partly because the lower-than-ex...

The production of habutae, a simple silk fabric, expanded rapidly between 1890 and 1918 in Japan's Fukui Prefecture, with large exports to Europe and the United States. The production of habutae, initially woven by hand, was labour intensive, but it gradually became capital‐intensive after the introduction of power looms. Production and export of t...

As in the case of any other sectors of the economy, the engine of agricultural growth in developing countries is the transfer of technology. This chapter pays a special attention to the role of transfer of intensive rice production systems from Japan to the former colonies of Taiwan and Kore before World War II, to tropical Asia in the 1960s to 198...

At present, how to develop industries is a burning issue in Africa, where population growth remains high and economic development has thus far failed to provide sufficient jobs for many, especially young people and women. The creation of productive jobs through industrial development ought to be a central issue in steering economic activity across...

Having achieved remarkable improvements in basic education, India now faces the issues of low learning levels, and a high dropout rate. This paper examines whether the learning crisis is responsible for students dropping out of school using unique panel data that followed nearly 1000 Indian children from 2002 to 2013. We discover that literacy skil...

More often than not, manufacturing industries are clustered in small areas in developing economies of Asia and sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA). While agglomeration economies arising from low transaction costs are a clear advantage of industrial clusters, a drawback is the ease of imitation, which leads to the gap between social and private benefits of inn...

This study examines the effects of wealth, human capital, and social group on the occupational choice and income of farm households, to gain an understanding of the mechanism underlying the recently increasing income diversification in rural eastern India. The results show that wealth and human capital have a positive impact on the choice of high-r...

This paper attempts to propose a strategy to support industrial development in Sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, it offers the following three closely related components in the development strategy: sequential support, which starts with the training of entrepreneurs followed by infrastructure investment and financial support (TIF); linkage with fo...

The last four decades have witnessed a large number of successful examples of industrial development in Asia, but possibly an equally large number of failures in other developing countries; particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and to some extent in South Asia.

Information spillovers from multinational enterprises to local firms in developing countries are examined in the literature on global value chains (GVCs) and foreign direct investment (FDI). However, both GVC and FDI studies are carried out independently and separately. On the one hand, GVC studies explore an important mechanism underlying the prod...

JEL classification Codes: D23 J15 K11 O12 O13 Q15 Q18 a b s t r a c t This study examines the evolutionary process of land tenure systems in Uganda from communal to private ownership with a special attention to the role of rural-to-rural migration as a key driving force. By tracing migration patterns using unique longitudinal household survey data...

If the middle-income traps were merely equated with prolonged growth slowdowns occurring in the middle-income stage, as it is in some empirical studies, this concept would lose the meaning of existence. This paper proposes a new definition that considers the trap the aggravation of slowdowns due to inadequate responses, such as the adoption of coun...

Contract farming (CF) has long been practiced but is becoming increasingly common in both developed and developing countries with the heightened interest of consumers in food safety and quality. Under CF, farmers and buyers make advance agreements on volume, quality, time of delivery, use of inputs, and price or pricing formula. This article critic...

Most, if not all, industrial development in the history of advanced countries and in the developing world is based on the development of industrial districts. A unique feature of this edited volume is to compare the development of industrial districts in the history of Japan, Spain, France, other European countries as well as contemporary developin...

Like manufactured products, quality variations are large in high-value agricultural products (HVPs) such as vegetables, fruits, and livestock products. Yet, it is difficult for retailers and consumers to identify immediately the quality as well as safety of HVPs. Like manufacturing industrial districts, innovation holds the key to the development o...

While the model of long-term development of industrial districts proposed by Sonobe and Otsuka (Cluster-based industrial development: an East Asian model. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2006; Cluster-based industrial development: a comparative study of Asia and Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2011) is useful for understanding the economic...

Improving the productivity of smallholder farms in Sub-Saharan Africa offers the best chance to reduce poverty among this generation of rural poor by building on the few resources farming households already own. It is also the best and shortest path to meet rising food needs. Using examples from farmers' maize and rice fields, comparisons with Asia...

This study considers the endogenous determination of land ownership systems to rigorously compare differences in the changes in forest quality between private and common property regimes. By employing the propensity score matching method, we found that there was significantly less forest degradation in private property areas than in common property...

This paper aims to examine the dynamics of land transactions, machine investments, and the demand for machine services using farm panel data from China. Recently, China’s agriculture has experienced a large expansion of machine rentals and machine services provided by specialized agents, which has contributed to mechanization of agricultural produc...

Farms throughout Asia are predominantly small. By nature, small farms use labour-intensive production methods. The question arises as to the viability of small farms in the face of the rapidly increasing wage rate in most Asian countries. There is also indication that the production efficiency of small farms has declined relative to large farms in...

When the wage rate is low, a labour-intensive production method is chosen. Since it is costly to monitor hired labourers in agriculture, small-scale farms dependent on family labour are more efficient than large farms relying on hired labour. This leads to the inverse relationship between farm size and productivity, if land markets do not reallocat...

In order to develop a strategy for a rice Green Revolution in sub-Saharan Africa, this study investigates the determinants of the adoption of new technologies and their impact on productivity of rice cultivation. We analyzed two kinds of data sets collected in Tanzania: a nationally representative cross-sectional data and a 3-year panel data of irr...

This book explores recent experiences in the effort to bring about a Green Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It focuses on rice and maize, which are promising and strategic smallholder crops. This chapter sets out the stage for the statistical analyses presented in later chapters by clarifying the importance of Green Revolution, identifying e...

As population pressure on land grows rapidly in Kenya, rural farmers have started to intensify land use, which has led to the emergence of a new maize farming system. The new system is characterized by the adoption of high-yielding maize varieties, the application of chemical fertilizer and manure produced by stall-fed improved dairy cows, and inte...

This chapter investigates the impact of technical intervention on the adoption of a set of improved rice production technologies, as well as on productivity and profit for smallholders in rainfed lowland areas in Northern Ghana. The key finding is that productivity and profit are significantly enhanced when modern varieties (MVs) and chemical ferti...

Observing clear upward trend in rice yield in SSA, this volume attempted to explore whether Green Revolution in rice has taken place in irrigated areas in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), whether it is possible to realize a rice Green Revolution in rainfed areas, and the extent to which technology and management training has been effective in disseminatio...

This book sheds new light on the role of industrial districts in the industrial development of the past and present. Industrial districts, which refer to the geographical concentration of enterprises producing similar or closely related commodities in a small area, play a significant role in the development of manufacturing industries not only hist...

This study explores the role of access to credit in improving rice production in Sub-Saharan Africa using the case of rice farmers in the large-scale Mwea irrigation scheme in Kenya. Using household level survey data, we find that the use of fertiliser and paddy yield per hectare are not significantly different among borrowers from the cooperative...

There is a variety of forest management institutions ranging from state management to community and private management. This article attempts to identify the conditions under which one institution outperforms the others in the efficiency of forest management based on a review of the literature, empirical evidence on the dominant forest management i...

While customary land tenure systems are still prevalent in most African countries, they are believed to be evolving to private land ownership. However, questions about how they are evolving and what determines this evolution remain un-answered. This study contributes to the literature by empirically analyzing the process of the evolution of land te...

This article reviews the past and potential future roles of land tenure reforms and land markets in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as responses to population growth in the process of land use intensification and livelihood transformation. The farm size distribution and the existence of an inverse relationship (IR) between farm size and land productivity...

This article investigates the impact of technical intervention on the adoption of a set of improved rice production technologies, as well as on productivity and profit for smallholders in rainfed lowland areas in Northern Ghana. The key finding is that productivity and profit are significantly enhanced when modern varieties (MVs) and chemical ferti...

In recent years, several randomized controlled experiments as well as experiments that are not randomized have been conducted to assess the impacts of management training intervention on the productivity and other aspects of business performance of firms. Yet the role played by management improvement vis-à-vis that of technology transfer or borrowi...

A growing literature documents the positive impact of community management on non-timber forest conservation but not on the condition of timber forests, which require higher management intensity than do non-timber forests. Using ground-level data of the age composition of trees and the management activities of timber forests and applying a rigorous...

Comparing dynamic changes in household income and poverty among urban, rural, and estate sectors in Sri Lanka from 1990 to 2006, this study finds that a shift of household income away from farm to nonfarm sources is accompanied by a significant improvement in household income and reduction in poverty, particularly in the rural sector. Major contrib...

In Vietnam, we have selected a knitwear cluster in Hatay province, which is near Hanoi but still surrounded by rural landscape. As in our sites in Addis Ababa (Chapter 6) and Dar es Salaam (Chapter 8), we conducted a classroom training program, in which trainees study in a classroom, and an onsite training programs, in which instructors visit train...

In Ethiopia, we implemented a classroom-training program and an on-site training program for entrepreneurs operating metalworking enterprises with three or more workers. The measurement of the training impacts in Ethiopia is likely to be affected by the increasingly favorable access to the knowledge of Kaizen due to the recent government policy of...

While policymakers in developing countries are eager to develop industries for job creation and poverty reduction, they are unaware of effective strategies to support industrial development. Surprisingly, neither international development organizations nor donor communities have provided useful recommendations for successful industrial development,...

Micro and small enterprises are widely recognized as a major source of employment and income in developing countries. If they grow in size, they would contribute more to economic growth and poverty reduction. In reality, however, their productivity remains low and their sizes remain small (e.g., Mead and Lieadholm, 1998; Tybout, 2000). While their...

For the last 15 years, we have conducted well over 20 intensive case studies of the development of industrial clusters beginning with Northeast Asia (Japan, Taiwan, and China), moving to one part of East Asia (Vietnam) and South Asia (Bangladesh and Pakistan), and finally proceeding to SSA (Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania). Most of these studi...

This chapter attempts to assess the impacts of teaching the very basics of Kaizen to owners of small enterprises has on their business performance. This experiment was conducted in a metalworking cluster in Nairobi, Kenya. In this cluster, Sonobe et al.’s (2011) observational study found that the enterprises varied considerably in the way they were...

In the garment cluster in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, a large number of self-employed tailors and a small number of ready-made garment (RMG) factories coexist, as we described in our previous study (Sonobe and Otsuka, 2011, Chapter 9). The enterprise data that we collected for the previous study in 2007 were used as baseline data for the present study o...

Until recently, it was generally believed that the acquisition of technological capability through technology transfer is essential to industrial development in developing countries, as manifested by such well-known works as Pack and Westphal (1986), Lall (1992), and the immense literature on technology spillovers from multinational firms to local...

In Tanzania, we conducted a new round of surveys of garment enterprises in March 2012. Although these enterprises are located in Dar es Salaam, they are not geographically as concentrated as in other clusters. We refer to this survey as the third follow-up survey because we conducted the first follow-up survey earlier in September 2010 after the cl...

What are the similarities and dissimilarities in the pattern of cluster development between contemporary developing countries and modern Japanese economic history? This study attempts to examine the relevance of the Sonobe–Otsuka model, which is designed to explain the long-term process of cluster-based development in developing countries, for unde...

AbstractI would like to argue in this article that in the process of economic development in land‐poor countries in Asia, agriculture faces three distinctly different problems: food insecurity, sectoral income inequality, and the declining food self‐sufficiency associated with the declining comparative advantage in agriculture at the high‐income st...

In this volume we have seen evidence that existing newer varieties of rice and maize can be and have been successful, and that there is great scope for additional transfers and adaptations of technology from Asia, particularly in lowland rice production. Even though improved technologies are required to drive any green revolution, lessons from the...

The Asian Green Revolution in rice entailed a long-term evolutionary process spanning more than four decades since the mid-1960s. The purpose of this chapter is to identify important lessons from the Asian Green Revolution in rice and examine whether the modern rice technology in Asia could be appropriately transferred to contemporary sub-Saharan A...

On average, agriculture accounts for 70% of full-time employment in Africa, 33% of national income, and 40% of total export earnings, and its importance is even greater in the poorest countries. Yet its performance in recent decades has been one of the worst in the world. Africa has some of the lowest levels of land and labor productivity and these...

One of the decisive factors determining agricultural yields is known to be climatic conditions, typically temperature and rainfall, which have a direct impact on agricultural production. To date, most of the empirical studies on how agro - climatic factors affect agricultural productivity have focused on developed countries. The purpose of this stu...

In Uganda, a new upland rice variety, namely New Rice for Africa (NERICA), was introduced in 2003 as one of its poverty eradication strategies essentially because it is high-yielding, which can results in both increased cash income and food security. In addition, NERICA is considered to be cultivable in most parts of Uganda thanks to its short matu...

Many specialists in African agriculture doubt whether a Green Revolution similar to the one achieved in Asia is possible in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The major reasons why SSA has failed to realize a Green Revolution are considered to be its unfavorable, dry and diverse climate. The purpose of this study is to assess the impacts of climate, as well...

This volume explores the usefulness of the Asian model of agricultural development for Africa, where, even before the recent world food crisis, half the population lived on less than on dollar a day, and a staggering one in three people and one third of all children were undernourished. Africa has abundant natural resources; agriculture provides mo...

Conventionally, agricultural technologies associated with the Asian Green Revolution (GR) have been regarded as a resource-demanding type of technologies which achieve higher crop yields by intensive use of inputs including water, but are therefore sensitive to harsh agro-ecological conditions such as droughts. This study uniquely explores the chan...

Asian countries have witnessed a sharp increase in real wage as a result of rapid economic growth and structural transformation in recent years. Using a country level panel data from 1980 to 2010, this paper examines the effects of real wage increase on Asian agriculture that traditionally used family labor intensively on small farms. The empirical...

If agricultural markets do not work well in sub-Saharan Africa, it will be inconceivable to increase crop yields, as this requires the increased application of purchased inputs and the marketing of increased output. This study therefore investigates whether and to what extent rice markets function in Uganda, where rice is a new crop. We found that...

Land reforms have played a central role in the political economy of many countries in the world and have been subject to massive disagreements between different political interest groups and ideologies. The 20th century included many of the largest social land reform experiments in history, as in the erstwhile Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, Ch...

Massive deforestation and degradation of forest conditions have been taking place in developing countries for several decades.1 Since the capacity of governments to protect and manage forests are limited, and the incentives to do so are even more so, state-owned forests tend to become severely degraded (Somanathan, 1991; Ostrom, 1990; Jodha, 2001)....

Poor management has long been suspected as a major constraint on job creation in the manufacturing sector in low-income countries. In this sector, numerous micro and small enterprises in industrial clusters account for a large share of employment. This paper examines the roles of industrial clusters and entrepreneurship in improving productivity an...

This research explores the changing structure of the rural economy in the Philippines from 1988 to 2006. We found that the expansion and upgrade of infrastructure such as electricity and roads and investment in secondary and tertiary education are important factors that induced the economic transformation of the rural economy. The importance of hig...

In Africa, most development strategies include efforts to improve the productivity of staple crops grown on smallholder farms. An underlying premise is that small farms are productive in the African context and that smallholders do not forgo economies of scale -- a premise supported by the often observed phenomenon that staple cereal yields decline...

This paper attempts to quantify the impact of fiscal decentralization in India on its social infrastructure and on rural development. Overall, the results in this paper indicate that Government of India within a federal framework has been fostering development equitably across its states, particularly through health and education expenditures aimed...

This study attempts to assess the impacts of a training program on the adoption of improved cultivation practices, the productivity of rice farming, and the income and profit from rice production by using ex-post non-experimental data in Uganda. We found that participation in the training program increased the adoption of the improved cultivation p...

This study finds that the development process of the Kiryu silk weaving district in Japan from 1895 to 1930 can be divided at least into the two phases, i.e., Smithian growth based on the inter-firm division of labor using hand looms and Schumpeterian development based on factory system using power looms. Weaving manufacturers-cum-contractors led S...

In order to explore the conditions of successful irrigation management, this study investigates the determinants of household contributions to the cleaning of irrigation channels and the availability of water. By using primary data collected in an irrigation scheme in Uganda, we find that household contributions to the cleaning of irrigation channe...

The need to construct an effective strategy for industrial development in low-income countries has been largely ignored by development economists because industrial policies have failed in many developing countries. This does not imply, however, that industrial development cannot be promoted. This paper attempts to synthesize the conventional wisdo...

This chapter examines the effect of new farm technology on the income of poor farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) using the case study of NERICA rice in Central and Western Uganda. NERICA has the potential to increase per capita income by $20 (12% of actual per capita income) and to decrease the poverty incidence, measured by the head count ratio,...

This chapter attempts to provide better understanding of the impacts of demonstrations or training of improved lowland rice management practices on its diffusion and rice yields by using the case of the JICA program in Eastern Uganda. The most important finding of this study is that lowland rice yield can be extremely high in Uganda if basic produc...

The eleven case study chapters are used to evaluate the three main hypotheses of the book which are related to the importance of markets, technological innovations, and soil fertility. We find that markets for fertilizer and some agricultural products are functioning well and that farmers are responding to changes in the markets by changing crop ch...

In this book, we examine hypotheses concerning the importance of markets, innovations, and soil fertility for stimulating agricultural productivity and reducing rural poverty by using large-scale household panel data, which are enriched with detailed market access and soil fertility data, from Kenya, Uganda, and Ethiopia. This chapter first present...

Small and informal enterprises are preponderant in Africa’s manufacturing sector. Their growth is negligibly low except when young and small, but little is known beyond this. This paper reports the results of our field study of a metalworking cluster in Nairobi. As competition was intensified by the entry of new enterprises, the education level of...

Tenancy markets provide an opportunity to trade land between labor-scarce farm households and labor-abundant households. In China and other rapidly growing countries in Asia where rural to urban migration is becoming active, facilitating well-functioning tenancy markets is important to increase farm size and farmer’s income. In China, however, indi...