A Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Capital Accumulation on Punjab Farms
Rachhpal Singh, Bant Singh, Jaswinder Kaur
1996
unpublished
The growth and development of an enterprise as well as of an economy are determined ostensibly by the level of technology and the efficiency of the market mechanism. But it is the use of capital that makes the above two factors operational. Hence, capital is the most vital input required for achieving the much desired goal of growth both in the micro and macro units of the economy and the agriculture sector is no exception. The farm sector, because of its special characteristics implying higher
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... degree of risk, low productivity, seasonal nature of production coupled with fluctuations in input and output prices, lacked lustre to allure the investors as compared to the other sectors of the economy. However, the advent of new farm technology during the late sixties and the early seventies of the present century promising higher returns gave a fillip to the farmers to make investments in irrigation structures and farm machinery and equipments such as tractors, threshers, seed drills, reapers, harrows, etc., and lately the combine harvesters through time. This process of incurring in the technology-needed capital investment in the above such assets has not been a one time phenomenon but a continuous process, and has occurred faster in some areas than in others. The investment on various capital assets is also bound to vary in magnitude on different categories of farms depending upon their capacity to invest and utilise the services of these capital assets owing to the differentials in the size of holdings and other socio-economic factors. Consequently, these investments were bound to have influenced the farm productivity at varying rates in different regions and size category of farms. Lately, there has been an impression that the investment in the capital assets on the farms, particularly in the agriculturally developed states like the Punjab has either decreased or has stagnated due to the stagnation in the yields of major crops and the rising capital costs of the farm equipment and machinery. The present study has, therefore, been conducted to examine the growth in capital accumulation and farm productivity during the post-green revolution period with respect to the Punjab that has experienced different technological innovations in its agriculture during the last over two and a half decades. The specific objectives of the study are: (1) to examine the pattern and growth in capital accumulation on different size-groups of farms in different agronomic regions of Punjab from 1971-72 through 1991-92, and (2) to bring out the incremental capital-output ratios on the small, medium and large-sized farms at different time intervals in the state.
doi:10.22004/ag.econ.297489
fatcat:xhfauedtlrgbpisdzujjcmfl7m