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Abstract
This study examines the widely held view that earnings from rural wage employment
can help farm households overcome constraints on farm investments. It uses a panel
dataset of 359 randomly selected farm households from three resettlement areas in
Zimbabwe over the period 1996/97 to 1998/99. It finds no evidence to support the
hypothesis that income from rural wage employment contributes towards increasing
farm investment for the sampled households, and it attributes this to very low savings
rates on rural wage employment income. Further, it finds that levels of farm
investment increase with the amount of labor and land used in farm production in the
previous year, and for households with male and/or older household heads. It also
finds an inverse relation between farm investment and farm capital stocks – evidence
that households that had higher levels of farm capital stocks were disinvesting in
agriculture over the period studied.