The authors analyse the impact of Fair Trade and organic farming on a sample of Fair Trade organic rice producers in Thailand, members of Green Net Cooperative. They find that per capita income from agriculture is positively and significantly affected by organic certification and FT affiliation years. Such effect does not translate into higher productivity due to a concurring increase in worked hours. FT and organic certification contributions are however downward biased if we do not take into account the relatively higher share of self-consumption of affiliated farmers. The main findings are robust when we control for selection bias and endogeneity with instrumental variables, propensity score matching and by restricting the sample to affiliated producers only. We also test which of the two (organic and FT) effects is stronger and find that the latter prevails.
The paper can be downloaded from www.econometica.it/wp/wp05.pdf
