Farm prices and input demand on rice farms in Karnataka

摘要

A normalised quadratic profit function appoarch is used to derive a set of factor demand equations, parameters of which are applied to estimate a set of own and cross price elasticities of demand. The data are from a cross section of 100 farms in Karnataka. The results showed positive relationship between the price of output and inputs, which increase in price of rice, resulted in increase in demand for human labour and chemical fertilizers. Fixed factors of production appear to be very important inincreasing the demand for variable inputs. A 10 percent increase in investment in irrigation expansion resulted in increase for human labour (by 0.6 percent), bullock labour (by 1 percent) and chemical fertilizers by (0.4 percent) respectively. However,increase in area under crop had not shown any effect on the use of inputs.