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Essays on the use of agricultural technologies in developing countries
Full text linkAdopting new technologies and agricultural practices can help smallholder farmers improving their livelihoods, increasing their income and other aspects of their well-being, such as nutrition. Despite this, adoption rates in developing countries are still low, especially in Africa. Factors affecting the adoption and the use of these practices are manifold and include elements such as access to information, risk aversion and sufficient liquidity. Among them, special attention in the recent debate has been paid to information and market access, which will be two of the core elements in this thesis. Indeed, here I try to provide a comprehensive picture of technology adoption, analyzing its determinants and the specific consequences on household food security and nutrition for women. Technology will be defined throughout the essays as something not necessarily new to the context under analysis but as an improved product (good or service) or process.
This work contributes to a deeper understanding of the debate on technology adoption in developing countries in several ways. Firstly, this thesis wants to contribute by pointing out benefits deriving from the use of agricultural technologies using a gender perspective and evaluating the impact of agricultural practices on women's nutrition and household food security, improving evidence that is still scarce. Secondly, it contributes to the debate around the determinants of the adoption of agricultural practices with peculiar reference to access to information and to the market for small farmers. Another relevant contribution of this thesis is the use, along the three essays, of several approaches to analyze transmission channels through formal or informal mediation analysis. Mediation analysis is a statistical framework used to analyze the mechanism through which a variable of interest, the treatment, affects an outcome through one or more intermediate variables called mediators. This methodology is commonly used in sociology, psychology, and epidemiology, but despite the importance of knowing transmission mechanisms of economic phenomena, few studies use this approach in economics. Indeed, many studies estimated the magnitude and the significance of an impact but cannot disentangle what are the causes of that impact, leaving the causal effect as what was called a “black box” in the mediation analysis literature. In principle, mediation analysis implies a sequence in the influence among variables. The treatment affects the outcome directly, and indirectly it has an influence on the mediator that in turn impacts the outcome. In real cases, it is not always so straightforward as there could be reverse causality and the use of cross-sectional data can create problems related to the temporal order of the variables in the analysis. The
analyses will be performed using both cross-sectional and panel data. Overall, throughout the three essays, some regularities emerged. However, the frameworks under examination in this thesis are quite complex and many variables could play a role, making the analysis complicated. Therefore, it is no surprise that across the manuscript results could lead to different conclusions depending on the context considered and requiring to approach them with caution.
This thesis is built by three independent, although related, empirical essays investigating both the determinants and the impact of agricultural technology and agricultural practices.
Essay 1 examines the link between agricultural technology use, food security and nutrition, using new panel data on smallholder oil palm growers in Ghana collected by the Agricultural Policy Research in Africa (APRA) consortium in 2017 and 2019. In this essay, I introduce a gender perspective, focusing on women and the possible mediating role of women's empowerment that could be an important mechanism in driving the results. Here, technology use will be defined firstly as the use of one practice among agrochemicals, irrigation, and intercropping, three relevant practices for oil palm cultivation in the country. Secondly, I narrowed the definition to the use of irrigation and agrochemicals only due to possible heterogeneity when including also intercropping. Using fixed effect models with interaction terms and a Heckman’s model, the core results are: i) for oil palm producers in south-western Ghana, the use of at least one agricultural practice among irrigation and agrochemicals is significantly linked with women’s dietary diversity; ii) women empowerment appears to be a positive factor for household food security, regardless of the technological use status and iii) women empowerment mediates the relationship between technology use and women’s dietary diversity.
Essay 2 shifts the focus to another country and a different type of technology. One of the main barriers to technology adoption identified in the literature is limited knowledge about the technology, a barrier that could be reduced by increasing and improving extension services. In this essay, I assess the role of extension services on the adoption of laser land leveling (LLL) among 604 households in the Indian state of Karnataka using cross-sectional data collected by the South Asia Regional (SAR) division of IFPRI. The empirical analysis includes propensity score matching and causal mediation analysis. The core results are: i) having visited at least once the extension center (or received a visit by its officials) increases the likelihood of using LLL; ii) after explaining the advantages of the technology and its cost, farmers develop a perception about the affordability of laser land leveling that mediates the treatment effects of the extension service on laser land leveling adoption.
Finally, essay 3 includes the role of market access in determining the use of agricultural technologies. This essay wants to shed light on the nexus between market access, the three main constraints to technology
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adoption detected in the literature (i.e., limited knowledge, farmers’ risk aversion and limited liquidity and access to credit), and the final adoption. Using the four waves of the LSMS-ISA for Nigeria, I firstly identify the local governmental areas (LGAs) that can be classified as hot spots and cold spots for the main crops grown in the country - cereals, cassava or tubers. To do so, I use the Getis and Ord statistic to detect how the geographical concentration of certain crops and agricultural commercialization are linked. Then, I employ an instrumental variables mediation analysis to account for non-random selection and possible simultaneity between market access and the use of agrochemicals. Results show a positive correlation between selling on the market and the outcome variable, and this is confirmed also by the instrumental variable mediation. The primary transmission channel identified seems to be the possibility to access to credit
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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