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Abstract
This thesis is focused on measuring and assessing country-level trends in average farm
size and farm size distributions over space and time and across income levels worldwide.
We develop and implement a new variant of the Generalized Method of Moments
approach to estimate farm size distributions derived from world census data.
Notwithstanding a major data collection effort, global generalizations are difficult due to
incomplete and inconsistent farm size samples over time. However, we did find that
average farm sizes have been increasing overall for both high and low to middle income
countries. We also detected complex structural differences between countries stratified by
income class. These differences were revealed by estimating farm size distributions (and
a range of associated summary statistics) that would otherwise be masked when
considering the global dynamics of farm size based only on changes in the average size
of farm per country.