Village‐Level Specialised Cultivation, Marshallian Externalities and Grain Total Factor Productivity: Evidence From Maize Farmers in China

ABSTRACT

Improving grain productivity is critical to food security in developing economies facing tightening resource and environmental constraints. Yet productivity gains remain uneven across regions and cannot be accounted for by farm‐level scale expansion alone. Using nationally representative panel data on Chinese maize‐farming households from 2012 to 2021, this study examines whether village‐level specialised maize cultivation (VSMC) is associated with household‐level maize total factor productivity (HMTFP). We find that VSMC is positively and robustly related to HMTFP. Additional evidence is consistent with the view that this relationship operates through a village‐level knowledge‐heterogeneous labour pool: productivity is higher in villages with larger maize labour pools, and the estimated association is stronger where those labour pools have greater explicit‐knowledge intensity. Because these mechanism measures proxy the conditions for knowledge exchange rather than knowledge flows themselves, the mechanism evidence should be interpreted as suggestive rather than definitive. The productivity gains associated with VSMC are also larger among initially less efficient farmers and in digitally connected or topographically constrained areas, but are not evident in ecologically fragile regions. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of village‐level production organisation and local conditions in shaping agricultural productivity.