Trade credit in Aquaculture Farming in Bangladesh

The study is based on data collected from aquaculture farmers through a structured interview schedule, which was administered by a team of trained graduate students. The interview schedule was pretested to evaluate the validity and clarity and to evade repetitive questions by interviewing 20 farmers from a known aquaculture production zone (Mymensingh district, an administrative area). Direct interview method was chosen because farmers lack of knowledge, skills, and attitudes to understand the questions and motivations. Farmers were selected randomly from the list of farmers provided by the local fisheries office. The sampling areas were selected based on the contribution of the regions to total aquaculture production in the country. In total 320 farmers’ responses were retained out of 350 interviewed farmers and rest were discarded because of inconsistency in the given responses. Finally, the data were tested for outlier and leverage points deleting 40 responses while 280 responses were retained and used in this study. The data contain information on major inputs and outputs, which are used for assessing technical efficiency of users and non-users of trade credit. Further, the data include information on three sets of variables in measuring impacts of trade credit on performance of pond aquaculture farms. The first set is treatment (dummy, with value 1 for trade credit users and 0 for non-users. The second set variables include farmers’ and farms characteristics (i.e., covariates). The third set variables are the outcome variables measuring performance i.e., culture period, yield, revenues, feed quantity, feed costs, Feed conversion ratio (FCR) and cost per kg of feed, gross sales value, margin, yield, costs per Kg., and FCR. In addition, there are nine responses obtained from both users and non-users of trade credit in identifying the determinants of trade credit. All of those responses are binary except one.