This study employs an experimental approach to estimate both the direct and indirect effects (i.e. spillovers) of an agricultural technology adoption program on small landholder farmers in Bolivia. Specifically, the evaluation focuses on the second phase of the "Creación de Iniciativas...

Untenable use of factors of production is causing severe land degradation and food insecurity problems especially in developing world. Land degradation threatens the ecosystem health and food security worldwide and will remain high priority on international agenda. Conservation agriculture (CA)...

The use of mobile phones in poverty reduction and development has ignited much interest over the past decade. To take advantage of the rapid expansion of mobile phones in developing countries, businesses, government agencies and non-governmental organisations are increasingly turning their...

This paper investigates the effects of social network structure on the diffusion of agricultural technologies using household-level panel data from Ethiopia. We correct for possible biases due to the endogeneity of social networks using a social experiment in which we provide mobile phones to...

The rapid spread of mobile phones across the developing world offers opportunities to improve service delivery for small-scale farmers. International and local companies have already started to capitalize on these opportunities although many mobile phone-enabled services are still at an early...

During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, fixed-rent tenancy gradually replaced sharecropping as the dominant form of land tenancy in China. This paper posits that the shift in land tenancy was generated by the technological movement from annual cropping to multiple cropping. To test the hypothesis we...

Using detailed census data covering over 40,000 farms in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, Canada, we document the vast and increasing farm size heterogeneity, and analyze the role of farm size in adapting to the removal of an export subsidy in 1995. We find that larger farms were more likely...

Can improving access to mobile extension improve agricultural productivity? Recent evidence suggests both significant and insignificant ways in which SMS-based agricultural information could affect farming outcomes. It is unclear if variations in the programs' design or the methodological...

Agricultural mechanization is on the rise in Africa. A widespread replacement of manual labor will change the face of African agriculture. Despite this potentially transformative role, only few studies have looked at the potential effects of mechanization empirically, mostly focusing on yields...

In this chapter we compute measures of total factor productivity (TFP) growth for developing countries and then contrast TFP growth with technological capital indexes. In developing these indexes, we incorporate schooling capital to yield two new indexes: Invention-Innovation Capital and...