Harnessing digital technology to improve agricultural productivity?

ABSTRACT: 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 challenges in evaluating the programs cause wide-ranging impacts. Extension hotline services provide rapid, unambiguous information by agricultural experts over the phone, tailored to time- and crop-specific shocks. Using methods from experimental economics, we randomly distributed the hotline number to generate exogenous variation in the access to farming information. We conducted our study among 300 farmers in the South Indian state of Karnataka. Our results show that eliminating informational inefficie

SUBMITTER: Subramanian A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8238233 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature