ABSTRACT
The main research question addressed in this book is whether it is important to distinguish between family and hired labour as production inputs in the traditional peasant agricultural production systems of the southern plain region of Nepal. The prime motivation behind this question was to test the validity of the conventional specification of the farm household model that treats family and hired labour as homogeneous inputs, allowing the production and consumption decisions of farm households to be modelled recursively. Another motivation was to explain the variation in the intensity of labour use across farm size so commonly observed in traditional agriculture.
