Mobile Phone Coverage and Producer Markets: Evidence from West Africa
By Jenny C. Aker, Marcel Fafchamps. 2014
242 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Mobile phone coverage has expanded considerably throughout the developing world, particularly within sub-Saharan Africa. Existing evidence suggests that increased access to information technology has improved agricultural market efficiency for consumer markets and certain commodities, but there is less evidence of its impact on producer markets. Building on the work of Aker (2010), this paper estimates the impact of mobile phone coverage on producer price dispersion for three commodities in Niger. The results suggest that mobile phone coverage reduces spatial producer price dispersion by 6 percent for cowpea, a semi-perishable commodity. These effects are strongest for remote markets and during certain periods of the year. The introduction of mobile phone coverage has no effect on producer price dispersion for millet and sorghum, two staple grains that are less perishable and are commonly stored by farmers. There are no impacts of mobile phone coverage on traders' gross margins or producer price levels, but mobile phone coverage is associated with a reduction in the intra-annual price variation for cowpea. These results are potentially explained by the fact that farmers engage in greater storage for storable commodities such as millet and sorghum.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Information Systems, Media Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/96b3fdf20ba62b535282c61d2d6358fcce7490ae
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Economics and Econometrics
- Joshua Blumenstock
- Nathan Eagle
- Marcel Fafchamps
- B. Minten
- F. Gubert
- Jenny C. Aker
- Kaivan Munshi
- Ruth Vargas Hill
In Information Systems
In Media Technology
Citations in the corpus
- Airtime transfers and mobile communications: Evidence in the aftermath of natural disasters (2016, background): “Recent work in this area describes how mobile phones can, under certain conditions, reduce information asymmetries and search costs in agricultural markets (Jensen, 2007; Aker, 2008; Fafchamps and Minten, 2012; Aker and Fafchamps, 2014), lower transaction costs (Jack and Suri, 2014), and potentially”
- Will digital technologies transform agriculture in developing countries (2016, unknown): “Aker and Fafchamps (2015) also find that the effect of mobile phones varies by crop in Niger.”