Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

6-1980

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Agricultural Economics

Major Professor

David W. Brown

Committee Members

Luther H. Keller, William E. Cole, Neal O. Walker

Abstract

In this study an analytical tool was developed to evaluate local impacts of agricultural changes on specific groups of farmers and workers in communities that depend heavily on a single commodity. The resulting model, "Perspective Analysis of Small Community Capital Accumulation" (called PASCCA for short), uses surplus from the dominant enterprise as the indicator to evaluate these impacts. It is built around representative neighborhoods (called "production communities') within which farmers and workers are grouped according to size of farm and roles in agricultural innovation. Each production community consists of a dominant farmer (or group of farmers) and households of other producers/workers who have labor or capital transactions with that dominant producer. The components of this model include 1) the composition of a typical production community; 2) labor and capital transactions among households in that community as well with outside groups; 3) key changes in government programs or agricultural technology being analyzed; and 4) impacts of these changes on production, household consumption, and surplus of the dominant commodity.

The PASCCA model is a simplification of Leontief input-output analysis. Leontief analysis examines interrelationships among all major sectors at an area-wide level. In contrast, PASCCA focuses on household linkages associated with a single major enterprise. This makes it easier to trace changes in traditional agrarian economies, where data may be sparse and transactions are often in terms of a certain commodity rather than money.

Village situations in V/est Java where rice is the dominant enterprise were used to help evolve the PASCCA model and to illustrate its use. Information needed for this empirical application was synthesized from several sources; census data for 1973 and earlier; a series of agro-economic surveys in West Java, 1967-1976; reports about Indonesian agricultural modernization programs; personal insights of the author based on his roles as a program supervisor, enumerator, and analyst in West Java since 1965; and published research from elsewhere in Southeast Asia. A representative production community for West Java was defined as having one large farmer (two hectares of wet-rice land), two medium farmers (0.6 hectares each), four small farmers (0.3 hectares each), and four landless workers.

One use of the PASCCA model is to examine effects of previous programs on surpluses of communities as a whole, as well as on distribution of surpluses among farmer/worker classes. In the West Java example, three recent government rice intensification programs were compared: Bimas with intensive guidance, Bimas with less intensive guidance, and the Mass Intensification program. Under the assumption made, it appeared that the intensive Bimas program generated the most surplus, but it also seemed to be the program in which relative gains of small farmers and landless workers were least.

The PASCCA model can also aid future policy decisions by predicting changes likely to result from proposed programs. To illustrate, two possible refinements of the Bimas and Inmas programs in West Java were examined: 1) a plan to rotate intensive help from one locality to another (which was predicted to increase overall surplus levels) and 2) a plan to encourage cooperative ownership of small tractors and rice mills (which was predicted to improve equity of rice surplus at the expense of total surplus). In further analysis, it was shown how aggregation of production community relationships to wider areas could provide a basis for estimating program net benefits as well as capabilities of specific groups to pay the costs.

It was suggested that the PASCCA model can be applied to other places in and outside Indonesia, as well as to non-rice economies, so long as there is a dominant enterprise where links and terms of trade center around a particular commodity. Also discussed were possible refinements in data sources, adaptions of the model to provide a more dynamic picture of changes over time, simplifications to encourage use by local decision makers, and useful follow ups in Indonesia.

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