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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 as the scale of production increases. This article explores a research design conundrum that encourages researchers who study the relationship between productivity and scale to use surveys with a narrow geographic reach in order to produce more reliable results, even though results are better suited for policy decisions when they are based on data that are broadly representative. Using a model of endogenous technology choice, we explore the relationship between maize yields and scale using alternative data. Since rich descriptions of the decision environments that farmers face are needed to identify the applied technologies that generate the data, improvements in the location specificity of the data should reduce the likelihood of identification errors and biased estimates. However, our analysis finds that the inverse-productivity hypothesis holds up well across a broad platform of data, despite obvious shortcomings with some components. It also finds surprising consistency in the estimated scale elasticities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper provides an overview of options for the design and implementation of national phone surveys. • The discussion draws on the experience with high-frequency phone surveys on COVID-19 in Africa. • Recommendations are provided for phone surveys to be the mainstay in routine and crisis monitoring efforts. Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, face-to-face survey data collection efforts came to a halt due to lockdowns, limitations on mobility and social distancing requirements. What followed was a surge in phone surveys to fulfill rapidly evolving needs for timely and policy-relevant microdata for understanding the socioeconomic impacts of and responses to the pandemic. Even as the face-to-face survey data collection efforts are resuming in different parts of the world with COVID-19 safety protocols, the rapidly-acquired experience with phone surveys on the part of national statistical offices and survey practitioners in low- and middle-income countries appears to have formed the foundation for phone surveys to be more commonly implemented in the post-pandemic era, in response to other shocks and as complementary efforts to face-to-face surveys. Informed by the practical experience with the high-frequency phone surveys that have been implemented with support from the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) to monitor the socioeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper provides an overview of options for the design and implementation of phone surveys to collect representative data from households and individuals. Further, the discussion identifies the requirements for phone surveys to be a mainstay in the toolkits of national statistical offices and the directions for future research on the design and implementation of phone surveys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution of women to labor in African agriculture is regularly quoted in the range of 60–80%. Using individual, plot-level labor input data from nationally representative household surveys across six Sub-Saharan African countries, this study estimates the average female labor share in crop production at 40%. It is slightly above 50% in Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda, and substantially lower in Nigeria (37%), Ethiopia (29%), and Niger (24%). There are no systematic differences across crops and activities, but female labor shares tend to be higher in households where women own a larger share of the land and when they are more educated. Controlling for the gender and knowledge profile of the respondents does not meaningfully change the predicted female labor shares. The findings question prevailing assertions regarding substantial gains in aggregate crop output as a result of increasing female agricultural productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]