Farm productivity and energy intake in rural India.

This paper attempts to verify whether the existence of the poverty nutrition trap has implications for agricultural productivity in rural India. We find evidence that energy intake has affected farm productivity in rural India irrespective of whether we do robust regression or control for self-selection issues through a Heckman procedure. Thus improving energy intake would help improve farm productivity in rural India. All correspondence to: Prof. Raghbendra Jha, ASARC, Division of Economics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia Phone: + 61 2 6125 2683 Fax: +61 2 6125 0443 Email: r.jha@anu.edu.au * The UK Department for International Development (DFID) supports policies, programmes and projects to promote international development. DFID provided funds for this study as part of that objective but the views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) alone. The authors would like to thank DFID for supporting this research.