Agricultural labor accounts for most of the employment in Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, few empirical studies have examined the reliability of farm labor measures emerging from household surveys. In this study, we report the results from a survey design experiment in rural Ethiopia that focus on the effects of survey respondent i.e., proxy vs self-report, on adult farm labor. Our results show that proxy respondents generate lower farm labor statistics relative to self-responses for men but not for women. The magnitude of the impacts for men reaches 3.9 percentage points or 4.3% lower rate of participation relative to the mean participation obtained from the self-report. Our results have implications for the current debate on the measurement of agricultural productivity and the collection of survey data in rural areas of developing settings.

在撒哈拉以南非洲，农业劳动占大多数就业。但是，很少有实证研究检查家庭调查中出现的农业劳动力指标的可靠性。在这项研究中，我们报告了埃塞俄比亚农村地区一项调查设计实验的结果，该实验着重于调查受访者（即代理人与自我报告）对成年农场劳动力的影响。我们的结果表明，相对于男性的自我回答，代理受访者产生的农业劳动力统计数据较低，而女性则不然。相对于从自我报告中获得的平均参与度，对男性的影响程度达到3.9个百分点或参与度降低4.3％。我们的结果对当前关于农业生产率的测量以及发展中地区农村地区的调查数据收集的辩论具有启示意义。