Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to estimate the farming product function of rural women and to determine the effect of human capital. The data was based on 300 husbands and wives from 150 farms with crops of high female input time rate such as house-cucumbers, house-strawberries, roses, agaric mushrooms and apples in 2003. According to the results, the rural women were mainly engaged in harvesting, selecting, sorting and packing among about 23 working steps in the Korean farm. These works require a long time for the highly-skilled and have a very important and sensitive effect on quality, quantity, price of products and the farm's income. The cultivated experience and the major cultivation step effect had a positive relationship to farm's income for women. The machine effect was estimated significantly at 0.3976, which indicated that the high-skilled farmers have a positive correlation to farm's income. The rural women's labor value has been evaluated relatively lowly compared with men performing the same work. As an example, women are paid an average of 62.3% of the men's wage in harvesting and packing in Korea.
