Labor productivity and employment gaps

After carefully measuring labor productivity across sectors using newly available, nationally representative household survey data, a UGA study by an agricultural and applied economist found that agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa is not a bastion of low productivity, but, rather, a large reservoir for underemployment. She paid particular attention to farm labor, which is often neglected in large scale, multi-topic surveys because of the challenges involved in collecting detailed agricultural data. It is important to better understand the reasons for low labor supply by agricultural workers in order to identify opportunities to increase annual output per agricultural worker.