Agricultural technology and poverty reduction: a micro-level analysis of causal effects

Mariapia Mendola ()

Departmental Working Papers from Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano

Abstract: Agricultural technology opens great opportunities of increasing food grain production in land scarce countries. But questions are raised about the potential adverse or favourable impact of new technology on economic conditions of the poor. This study is aimed at contributing to the debate about the relative importance of "direct effects" of agricultural technology adoption in poverty alleviation strategies. It does so through an empirical investigation of the relationship between technological change, of the Green Revolution type, and wellbeing of smallholder farm households in two rural Bangladeshi regions. The paper tackles a methodological issue in assessing the "causal effect" of technological change on farm-household wellbeing through the non-parametric p-score matching analysis. It pursues a targeted evaluation of whether adopting a modern seed technology causes resource-poor farmers to improve their income and decrease the propensity to fall below the poverty line. It finds a robust and positive effect of agricultural technology adoption on farm household wellbeing suggesting that there is a large scope for enhancing the role of agricultural technology in "directly" contributing to poverty alleviation.

Keywords: Farm household behaviour; Technology adoption; Poverty alleviation; Propensity score matching (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I32 O33 Q12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-01-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://wp.demm.unimi.it/files/wp/2005/DEMM-2005_014wp.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mil:wpdepa:2005-14

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Departmental Working Papers from Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano Via Conservatorio 7, I-20122 Milan - Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by DEMM Working Papers ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).