Labour Productivity and Requirements

Abstract

From these figures of national agricultural product, necessarily limited to countries for which reasonably good national statistics are available, we now turn to information on productivity based on general local observation, or studies of individual farms, or groups of farms. To have such information in the form merely of round-figure general averages is a useful start: but it is much more interesting if we are able to compare farms at different levels of labour input/ha., so that we can estimate the marginal productivity of labour, or of land. These procedures have not yet been carried out satisfactorily in any great number of cases by agricultural economists even in the advanced countries, and we must be content with rough and ready measurements. Nevertheless, they are of great interest and importance. Finally, we can test our results by applying the basic economic theorem, that the wage paid to hired agricultural labourers should be approximately equal to the marginal product of labour.