Chapter 7 Human capital: Education and agriculture

This chapter presents a review and synthesis of effects of education in agriculture, summarizes major contributions, and suggests major research gaps in the literature. Although growth in knowledge enables skill acquisition and specialization of labor, which generally raises labor productivity, and technical change, the dominant effect on agriculture has been technical change. A puzzle remains why schooling does not have broader direct impacts in agriculture. Furthermore, as we proxy education or general intellectual achievement by schooling in our empirical research, this has led to biased interpretations of impacts when general intellectual achievement of school graduates changes over time and perhaps in nonlinear ways.