Abstract

The dissertation consists of three essays in the field of agriculture economics, climate change, and nutrition. I have structured it as three chapters, namely ‘Fertilization Impact Of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide On Agricultural Yield’, ‘Are Production And Consumption Decisions Independent? Identifying Separability In Indian Agriculture’, and ‘Identifying The Income Nutrition Pathway For Agricultural Households’.In the first chapter I test for the effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide on agricultural yield. Plant physiology suggests an increase in agriculture yield with increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, as plants fix carbon dioxide in the process of photosynthesis. In the study I find there is a positive effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide on agriculture yield of wheat in India, and the effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide on rice depends on the variety of the rice crop used. This is a first of its kind, large scale study for India identifying the effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide on agriculture yield. In the second chapter I test for separability or its failure in India’s agriculture markets. Separability is the property of households making production decisions independent of their consumption preferences. I make use of a 960 household panel data from Chandrapur district for the test. I derive the condition that under separability the agriculture farm revenue is independent of input endowment of the farming households. I find that there is a breakdown of separability in the households . Identifying separability provide insights in to the performance and functioning of markets. The third chapter establishes the linkage from income to nutrition for the agriculture households where separability does not hold, making use of the panel of 960 households from the study on separability in the second chapter. I find that the diet diversity improve with increased farm revenue for these agriculture household.

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