Access to finance and difference in family farm productivity in Benin: Evidence from small farms

In most of developing countries, agricultural finance is weak and there is a great constraint for family farmers to access credit. In that context, this article aims to analyze the effect of access to finance on the productivity of smallholders family farmers. Using a rich national representative survey data covering the 2016-2017 agricultural season, we estimated an Endogenous Switching Regression (ESR) model. The results show that access to credit has a positive impact on the productivity of smallholder farmers, with a gain of 15%. Small farmers manage to achieve a 13% increase in productivity, which is a very significant per-formance. These findings suggest the establishment of a policy to support small farms, so that they are more productive and more favorable to agricultural growth. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of African Institute of Mathematical Sciences / Next Einstein Initiative. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )