ABSTRACT Agriculture is the cornerstone of sub‐Saharan Africa's (SSA) economy, contributing substantially to national income and employing a significant proportion of the labour force. Despite its economic importance, the sector remains dominated by smallholder farmers with low productivity. In response, the African Union launched the Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Program (CAADP) in 2003 to transition African agriculture from subsistence‐based to market‐oriented production through increased public investment. This study examines the impact of fiscal agricultural expenditure on agricultural productivity in the SSA region and investigates convergence in agricultural productivity across countries. Using unbalanced panel data from 30 SSA nations (2003–2023), we employed panel corrected standard errors (PCSE) to address cross‐sectional dependence, with feasible generalised least squares (FGLS) for robustness. Beta‐ and sigma‐convergence tests further assessed disparities in productivity trends. The findings reveal that agricultural expenditure has a significant impact on productivity: A 1% increase leads to a 0.02% rise in total factor productivity, a 0.05% increase in labour productivity and a 0.2% improvement in land productivity following the implementation of CAADP. In addition, the implementation period of CAADP used as a policy dummy also has a positive influence on agricultural productivity when compared to the baseline period. Similarly, the study indicates the persistent existence of absolute and conditional beta‐convergence in three agricultural measures. Meanwhile, sigma‐convergence tests confirm a reduction in dispersion of total factor productivity, but divergent results are observed for labour and land productivities. These findings suggest that heightened public investment is needed to accelerate productivity growth and narrow performance gaps in SSA's agricultural sector.
Seyoum et al. (Fri,) studied this question.