Associations Between Family Management Agreements and Farm Outcomes in Hokkaido, Japan: A Quasi-Experimental Analysis Considering Spatial Heterogeneity

Family Management Agreements (FMAs) are voluntary intra-family arrangements designed to improve communication among family members, clarify roles, and facilitate management succession. Although FMAs have long been emphasized in agricultural policies, quantitative evidence on how they relate to farm household outcomes remains limited. Using cross-sectional microdata from the 2000 World Census of Agriculture and Forestry in Japan, we first describe the patterns of FMA adoption and examine spatial heterogeneity. We then evaluate the relationship between FMAs and four outcomes related to women’s participation, the existence of successors, and farm management practices—specifically, business activities related to agricultural production, and the adoption of environmentally sustainable agricultural practices. We employ propensity score matching with preferential within-cluster matching to address spatial clustering in treatment assignments. The results indicate that municipality-level variation accounts for a notable share of the total variance in FMA adoption and that FMAs are positively associated with engagement in business activities related to agricultural production and the adoption of environmentally sustainable farming practices. These findings suggest that FMAs are not merely voluntary initiatives undertaken by individual farm households but have also been shaped by municipality-based movements. Moreover, FMAs may function not only as mechanisms for clarifying intra-household roles, but also as catalysts for diversification and sustainability-oriented management strategies.