Estimating the average treatment effect of adopting stress tolerant variety on rice yield in China

Abstract

Climate extremes, characterized by droughts and floods, have become one of the major constraints to sustainable improvement of rice productivity. Variety choice, considered as one of the main adaptation measures, could help farmers reduce yield loss resulting from these extremes. Based on a three-year panel survey of 1 080 Chinese rice farms in major rice producing provinces, we assume Hicksian neutral technology and employ an IV regression to estimate the average treatment effect (ATE) on rice yield for adopting stress tolerant variety, and find that farmers who adopted the stress tolerant variety on average increased rice yield by 15.5% in comparison to the non-adopters.