An Assessment of Experimental Evidence on Agricultural Technology Adoption in Developing Countries

By Jeremy R. Magruder. Annual Review of Resource Economics, 2018

163 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article reviews recent results on technology adoption in developing countries, primarily from field experiments. It focuses on studies that highlight three constraints to adoption: credit, insurance, and information. Interventions supplying credit are consistently effective in spurring technology adoption for a minority of farmers, while interventions supplying insurance have had more mixed results. This review suggests that one mitigating factor on demand for both of these products is incomplete information, which adds additional uninsurable risk to the technology adoption decision. A broad group of studies identify the presence of strong informational frictions. The review concludes with some potential directions for future research.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/786e6411796cf11d5da01abe708fcd08c2629e69

Citations in the corpus

• Using agriculture for development: Supply- and demand-side approaches (2020, unknown): “It consists in securing the existence and profitability of innovations, ensuring their local availability, and then overcoming each of the four major constraints to demand and adoption through either better technology or through institutional innovations (Magruder, 2018; Bridle et al., 2019).”