An Assessment of Experimental Evidence on Agricultural Technology Adoption in Developing Countries

This article reviews recent results on technology adoption in developing countries, primarily from field experiments. It focuses on studies that highlight three constraints to adoption: credit, insurance, and information. Interventions supplying credit are consistently effective in spurring technology adoption for a minority of farmers, while interventions supplying insurance have had more mixed results. This review suggests that one mitigating factor on demand for both of these products is incomplete information, which adds additional uninsurable risk to the technology adoption decision. A broad group of studies identify the presence of strong informational frictions. The review concludes with some potential directions for future research.