A Panel Data Analysis Model to Assess the Impact of Institutional Factors on Crop Diversification of Assam, India

The process of crop diversification is generally used in agriculture to mitigate both production and price risk. Crop diversification is a process through which farmers diversify his farm activities from one crop to different value added crops so that he minimizes the existing risk in his farm operation. Most of the studies in literature in context to crop diversification have identified different factors that influence crop diversification in their study area. However, very few studies have attempted to examine the impact of institutional factors on crop diversification at macro level by using district level panel data in Assam. Therefore, this study makes an attempt to examine the impact of institutional factors on crop diversification through panel analysis. To fulfill the objective of this paper secondary data have been collected from different issues of Statistical Hand Book of Assam, assamstate.com, RBI, etc. The overall results of this paper show that institutional factors like farm size have positive impact on crop diversification except institutional credit. Institutional credit has negative impact on crop diversification. This paper will definitely help to bring some policy changes in the macro level to optimize crop diversification in the region.