Post - World Bank Development Impact Blog
by Markus Goldstein
“I recently came across a paper by Kelsey Jack which is a white paper for the J-PAL and CEGA Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative (ATAI). This paper systematically explores the barriers to technology adoption that come from market inefficiencies, what we know about these, and what research is going on (under ATAI) to fill these gaps.
The neat thing about this paper is its systematical-ness. By working through the full range of market inefficiencies, what Kelsey is doing is of immense use for policy makers and researchers. Through a fairly tight economic lens, we can see what the problems are and what we need to know more about in order to address them. It gives us some sense of what is important, and what is unexplored – taking a broad area of agricultural policy as the framing motivation (as opposed to an individual question of theory or a super cute experimental design). My first thought was that we need more of these for other areas as well. This does not look at all easy to do, but this is a serious public good…”
