Abstract

The paper examines the impact of rural road improvement on high yielding variety technology adoption. Rural roads improvement enhances access to output and input markets and thus decreases cost of accessing high-yielding variety (HYV) seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and information on HYV cultivation technique, and further increases the relative profitability of HYV rice. Therefore, the paper hypothesizes that it induces farmers to increase HYV acreage and reduce traditional local variety rice acreage. This paper supports the hypothesis that road improvement increases HYV rice acreage using empirical analysis, while it does not find a statistically significant impact on local variety rice. The results are robust to different specifications and sample sizes. Therefore, the policy implications of this paper is that rural roads can be used to complement other efforts to promote technology adoption.

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