Aspirations and Farmers Investment Choices An Investigation of Aspirations Failure in South Africa
Recent literature in development and welfare economics tackles the interaction between aspirations and investment and their role in sustaining poverty. Our paper investigates this relationship by exploring income aspirations of emerging farmers and their investments in agriculture inputs in South Africa. It follows the theoretical approach introduced by Appadurai (2004) and Ray (2006) and employs a simplified version of the empirical model introduced by Janzen et al. (2017) We find no significant evidence of aspirations failure or the inverse U shaped relationship that is predicted by the theory. Our analysis does not show any effects nor does it predict different hypothesis. We provide possible attributes for these outcomes, mainly on the design of the survey, type of investments, and motives behind engaging in small scale agribusiness. Acknowledgement We express our sincere gratitude to the Department of Agriculture Economics at the University of Stellenbosch, the Bureau for Food and Agricultural Policy (BFAP) and the great team of enumerators for their dedication, for providing valuable insights and for assisting with the survey in the field.