Political Repression, Authoritarian Governance, and Agricultural Performance: Evidence from Ethiopia

This study examines the impact of political repression and authoritarian agricultural policies on cereal crop yields across three historical and modern regime periods in Ethiopia, spanning five decades: the military-socialist Derg (1974-1991), the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) (1992-2018), and the Prosperity Party (PP) (2018-present). Country-level annual time-series data were compiled from multiple sources. Aggregated cereal yield data were collected from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Indicators of political repression were gathered from the Varieties of Democracy) dataset. Piecewise (known break) structural break model was utilized with Instrumental Variable Two-Stage Least Squares to analyze the data. The regression results reveal that severe political repression, such as state-sponsored torture and politically targeted killings, significantly lowered cereal yield. The findings show that the effects of political repression are more intense under the EPRDF and PP regimes, despite their explicit claims of pro- rural policies and large-scale agricultural programs. The effect of repression persists even after controlling for agricultural inputs and climate factors, underscoring the severity of the shock. As expected, fertilizer applications and machinery use are positively and significantly associated with cereal yield. Conversely, temperature is negatively and significantly correlated with cereal yield, accentuating the vulnerability of agriculture to climate change. Likewise, the findings demonstrate that land holding per person had a negative and significant effect on cereal yield. However, as expected, fertilizer use and mechanization are positively and significantly associated with cereal yield, highlighting the role of agricultural inputs in boosting productivity. The main epilogue of this study is that sustainable agricultural growth requires not only investment and policy reforms but also decoupling agricultural decisions from politics and shielding agricultural affairs from political interference.