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 behaviour 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.
Part I. Peasants, Economics, Political Economy: 1. Peasants; 2. The neoclassical theory of farm production; 3. Elements of peasant political economy; Part II. The Theory of the Optimising Peasant: 4. The profit-maximising peasant; 5. The risk-averse peasant; 6. The drudgery-averse peasant; 7. The farm household peasant; 8. The sharecropping peasant; Part III. Inside the Peasant Household: 9. Women in the peasant household; Part IV. Further Topics and Overview: 10. Farm size and factor productivity; 11. Technical change; 12. Environment; 13. Peasant economics in perspective; References; Index.
