Title: Technology Adoption and Quality Upgrading in Agricultural Supply Chains: A Field Experiment in Vietnam

Speaker: Sangyoon Park, HKU

Time: November 13, 2020, 13:30-15:00

About the speaker:

Dr. Sangyoon Park received his Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University, and joined the Faculty of Business and Economics at The University of Hong Kong in 2016. Sangyoon's research interests lie at the intersection of development, labor, and personnel economics.  His current research focuses on topics related to peer effects, gender, and technology adoption.

Abstrat:

We conduct a randomized experiment to examine the impact of technology training on technology adoption and quality upgrading in the dragon fruit supply chain in Vietnam. We randomly varied subjects of the training group across matched farmer-intermediary clusters---only farmers, only intermediaries, or both---and provided training on Good Agricultural Practices (GAP). We find strong evidence that insufficient knowledge and asymmetric information on quality between farmers and intermediaries have hindered technology adoption and quality upgrading. Specifically, we show three main results. First, training farmers increases the adoption of GAP technology and upgrades product quality as measured by compliance with international standards on pesticide residue. This suggests that insufficient knowledge may have hindered technology adoption. Second, jointly training farmers and intermediaries has an even stronger effect on farmers' technology adoption and quality upgrading. Third, we find no evidence of knowledge transfers from trained intermediaries to untrained farmers. The last two results together emphasize the role of asymmetric information on quality in hindering technology adoption and quality upgrading.