Peasant Economics: Farm Households in Agrarian Development

By Frank Ellis

This is a revised and expanded edition of a popular textbook on the economics of farm households in developing countries. The second edition retains the same building blocks designed to explore household decision-making in a social context. Key topics are efficiency, risk, time allocation, gender, agrarian contracts, farm size and technological change. For these and other topics, household economic behavior represents the outcome of social interactions within the household, and market interactions outside the household. A new chapter on the environment combines exposition of economic tools not previously covered in the book with examination of household and community decision-making in relation to environmental resources.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521457114
• ISBN13: 9780521457118
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Critical examination creates Best Summaries of the Issues

After reading thousands of pages on the debate of returns to scale in agriculture I was amazed to find this small book present the entire issue in just 20-30 pages without leaving out any position I had previously covered. As with all the other issues all sides are presented fairly and both neo-classical and marxist dogmaticism scrutinized. The chapters on Environment and gender relations were written in response to new developments since the first edition and are not as complete as the other issues. The book assumes no previous economic knoweldge and has a chapter explaining how to interpret the graphs used later in the book. unlike most textbooks the end of chapter summaries and "further reading" lists are actually useful.