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Percentage of Production Sold

This metric examines the extent of farmer participation in selling goods to market versus keeping them for home consumption. This may provide an indication as to the farmer’s choice of output use or raise questions as to why the households are unable to sell surplus production to the market. Depending on whether the good is meant to be a food crop, cash crop or both, this indicator is useful to also examine which type of households are market participants and which are not.

How to operationalize the metric

Method of data collection and data needed to compute the method:

Household-level data are collected by survey to compute this metric. The basic data gathered are centered on the amount farmers produce and sell. In the agricultural survey, questions are enumerated on the amount of output that a farmer produced on a given crop or livestock product. This is then followed up with questions to indicate how much or what proportion was sold to the market. 

  1. Did you harvest any [crop] during the past season?
  2. How much of [crop] was harvested?
  3. Did you sell any of the [crop] produced during the past season?
  4. What was the quantity sold?

A complete set of questions can be found in sections 4A and 5A of the Tanzania LSMS-ISA survey (NBS, 2014) and other standard agricultural World Bank surveys. 

Unit of analysis:

The metric for this indicator is obtained by dividing the amount that was produced by the household by the amount that was sold for given output. This provides a percentage of amount sold. Therefore, households with a higher percentage participated more in the market for that given good than the others. 

Limitations regarding estimating and interpreting:

Market participation may be a good basic indicator for examining levels of market participation. It may tell us if households are able to sell surplus goods, which may be a crude way to assume they may recoup their investment in technology. But market participation should be interpreted with caution. High market participation does not mean it will lead to profitability of a technology or that an increase in participation may be an indication of better market access. These issues should be further investigated by the researcher in the context of the project.

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