Governments and development agencies increasingly promote agro-clusters as a pathway to improving smallholder incomes and ensuring inclusive rural development through mitigating production and market risks. However, there is very limited empirical evidence to support this promise. We use a large farm household survey of about 4000 smallholder farmers in Ethiopia growing cereals like teff, maize, wheat, maltbarley and sesame to examine the relationship between agro-clusters and smallholder welfare and poverty. Using instrumental variable estimators, we establish a positive association between agro-clusters, household income and per capita income. Agro-clusters are also shown to reduce poverty and poverty gaps. Our results are robust over different agro-cluster proxies and alternative estimators, such as the augmented inverse probability weighting estimator. We also show that our findings are unlikely to be driven by omitted variable bias. Moving beyond average effects and in the interest of understanding heterogeneous effects, we use quantile regressions at different income levels. We find that agro-clusters are associated with welfare gains for all households. However, the most significant gains are observed for the wealthier households. Despite this regressive association, our findings suggest that agro-clusters may be useful in making farming more profitable with significant welfare implications.

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农业集群有利于穷人吗？来自埃塞俄比亚的证据

政府和发展机构越来越多地推动农业集群作为提高小农收入和通过降低生产和市场风险确保包容性农村发展的途径。然而，支持这一承诺的实证证据非常有限。我们对埃塞俄比亚约 4000 名种植画眉草、玉米、小麦、麦芽大麦和芝麻等谷物的小农户进行了大型农户调查，以检验农业集群与小农福利和贫困之间的关系。使用工具变量估计，我们在农业集群、家庭收入和人均收入之间建立了正相关关系。农业集群也被证明可以减少贫困和贫困差距。我们的结果对不同的农业集群代理和替代估计器都很稳健，例如增广逆概率加权估计器。我们还表明，我们的发现不太可能是由遗漏变量偏差驱动的。超越平均效应并为了理解异质效应，我们在不同收入水平下使用分位数回归。我们发现农业集群与所有家庭的福利收益相关。然而，最显着的收益出现在较富裕的家庭身上。尽管存在这种倒退关联，但我们的研究结果表明，农业集群可能有助于提高农业利润并产生重大福利影响。我们发现农业集群与所有家庭的福利收益相关。然而，最显着的收益出现在较富裕的家庭身上。尽管存在这种倒退关联，但我们的研究结果表明，农业集群可能有助于提高农业利润并产生重大福利影响。我们发现农业集群与所有家庭的福利收益相关。然而，最显着的收益出现在较富裕的家庭身上。尽管存在这种倒退关联，但我们的研究结果表明，农业集群可能有助于提高农业利润并产生重大福利影响。