The effect of cooperative membership on agricultural technology adoption in Sichuan, China

摘要

Farmer cooperatives may promote technology adoption in agricultural production, which, in turn, increases crop productivity and farmers' income. However, empirical evidence of how and to what extent cooperatives facilitate the technology adoption extensity, defined as the number of technologies adopted by a farmer from a wide range of agricultural technologies, remains unclear. To address this knowledge gap, we examine the impact of cooperative membership on the technology adoption extensity using cross-sectional data collected from 413 farm households in Sichuan province of China. We use propensity score matching combined with an instrumental variable approach to address the sample selection bias associated with voluntary cooperative membership choice. The statistical results suggest that cooperative membership has a positive effect on the technology adoption extensity when all 13 surveyed technologies are considered. However, the separate analyses on the adoption of production and post-harvest technologies reveal that cooperative membership has an insignificant impact on the number of adopted production technologies, but it significantly increases the number of post-harvest technologies adopted. These empirical findings are in line with the new institutional economics theories and our observations on the ground.