@article{Takeshima:277457,
      recid = {277457},
      author = {Takeshima, H.},
      title = {The Roles of Agroclimatic Similarity and Returns to Scale  in the Demand for Mechanization: Insights from Northern  Nigeria},
      address = {2018-07},
      year = {2018},
      abstract = {Despite economic transformations and urbanization,  declining shares of the workforce employed in the  agricultural sector, production costs in the agricultural  sector and food prices remain high in Nigeria relative to  those in some of the other developing countries.  Understanding how the adoption of mechanical technologies  is related to agricultural productivity is therefore  important for countries like Nigeria. Using farm household  data from northern Nigeria as well as various spatial  agroclimatic data, this study shows that the adoption of  key mechanical technologies in Nigerian agriculture (animal  traction, tractors, or both) has been high in areas that  are more agroclimatically similar to the locations of  agricultural research and development (R&D) stations, and  this effect is heterogeneous, being particularly strong  among relatively larger farms. Furthermore, such effects  are likely to have been driven by the rise in returns on  scale in the underlying production function caused by the  adoption of these mechanical technologies. Agricultural  mechanization, represented here as the switch from manual  labor to animal traction and tractors, has been not only  raising the average return on scale but also potentially  magnifying the effects of productivity-enhancing  public-sector R&D on spatial variations in agricultural  productivity in countries like Nigeria. 

Acknowledgement :   This work was undertaken as part of and funded by the  CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and  Markets (PIM), which is led by the International Food  Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and funded by CGIAR Fund  donors, the United States Agency for International  Development Food Security Policy project, the Syngenta  Foundation, and IFPRI s Nigeria Strategy Support Program.  This paper has not undergone IFPRI s standard peer-review  process. The opinions expressed here belong to the authors  and do not necessarily reflect those of PIM, IFPRI, or  CGIAR. The authors are solely responsible for all remaining  errors.},
      url = {http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/277457},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.22004/ag.econ.277457},
}