Publication:

COMPETING DEMANDS FOR RURAL HOUSEHOLD’S TIME IN MALAWI

Time is a scarce resource. Economics is about the allocation of scarce resources to competing uses (Ruuskanen 2004). The problem of the producer’s choice (household) can be put as a time allocation problem: How many hours have to be allocated to agricultural and health production. Allocation of time is driven by the desire to produce the optimal possible output from health and agricultural production. This study employs a seemingly unrelated regression method to investigate the relationship that exists on the amount of time allocated to each of the two complementary but competing production processes among rural households in Malawi. The results confirm the apriori that the two production processes compete for household’s time. The amount of time allocated to health production reduces the amount of time available for agricultural production.