“Economics of Share-Cropping in Haryana (India) Agriculture” – Rejoinder

Salam [I8] raised a number of questions about my paper, and these can be briefly summarized here. (1) Inadequate description of sample. (2) Treatment of irrigated and unirrigated parts of a farm under same management as separate subfarms is questionable. (3) What prices have been used for farm products and byproducts consumed on the farm. (4) Many heterogeneous inputs have been aggregated together. (5) How the production expenditure presented in Table 3 has been estimated, and what wage rates have been used in these calculations’ (6) Data presented in Table 2 and its interpretation are confusing and misleading. (7) The explanation provided for the relatively lower use of purchased inputs on share cropping farms (Table 5) is incorrect. (8) The estimation and discussion of returns to scale is redundant. (9) Some of the explanatory variables e.g. cropping intensity, number of fragments per farm, and managerial ability have been omitted from the model. (10) Operational size of farm is not an appropriate explanatory variable. (II) The effect of farm size on relative economic efficiency has been overlooked. (I2) Aggregation of gross value of output for multicrop farms is likely to bias the results in an unknown direction, because crop composition may not be uniform across farms, and (I3) Measurement of inputs in value terms are affected by prevailing market imperfections.