Evaluating The Adoption And Impacts Of Agricultural Technologies

Evaluating the adoption and impacts of agricultural technologies

Adoption and impacts of agricultural technologies and sustainable natural resource management practices in fragile and conflict affected settings: A review and meta-analysis

Climate change and conflicts co-exist in many countries with significant welfare and socio-environmental implications. Different approaches are being promoted to adapt and build resilience to these fragilities including the adoption of sustainable farm practices that have the potential to increase agricultural productivity and maintain environmental sustainability. We undertake a systematic review and perform a meta-analysis to understand and synthesize the adoption and impacts of agricultural technologies and natural resource management practices with a special attention to fragile and conflict affected settings. We employ state of the art machine learning methods to enable process and selection of appropriate papers from a universe of over 78,000 papers from leading academic databases. We find that studies on adoption and impact of agricultural technologies and natural resource management practices are highly clustered around Ethiopia and Nigeria. We do not find any studies on Small Island States. We observe a wide array of characteristics that influence adoption of these technologies. Of the over 1400 estimates of determinants collected, majority predict input technologies while very few studies and estimates are found in relation to risk management and mechanisation technologies. Our meta-analysis shows an average effect size of 7 - 9% for the different technologies and practices. For the outcomes: land productivity, food security and household welfare, we obtain effect sizes of 6, 8 and 9% respectively. We do not observe much in terms of publication bias. Both climate and conflict vulnerability not only cause far more food insecurity, poverty, and degradation of the environment on their own but also reinforce each other through the climate change – conflict linkage. For these detrimental effects to be curtailed, utilisation of climate-smart agricultural technologies and natural resource management practices need to be encouraged. We thus lend credence to the development, dissemination and upscaling of these sustainable practices. We observe a lot of space for growth and adoption of these technologies.

Economic Growth and Development in Ethiopia

This volume is a collection of selected empirical studies on determinants of economic growth and development in Ethiopia.The core argument for editing this book is to provide an up-to-date picture of the state and patterns of growth and development in Ethiopia. Ethiopia has been under focus in the past due to draughts, war, famine, development changes and the effects of global economic crisis in the country. A main contribution of this volume is that it helps identify selected important determinants of growth and development in Ethiopia and provides an estimation of their effects using up-to-date data, modelling and methods. Taken together the studies provide a comprehensive picture of the state of growth and development, their measurements, causal relationships and evaluation of efficient policies and practices in achieving progress in Ethiopia. The issues covered represent major challenges to the government and development organizations who are aiming at achieving higher growth and alleviating poverty in the country. The studies cover transition from rural agriculture to urban industry and the development of services.