Abstract
Although a large literature highlights the impact of personality traits on key labour market outcomes, evidence of their impact on agricultural production decisions remains limited. Data from 1,200 Ghanaian rice farmers suggest that noncognitive skills (polychronicity, work centrality, and optimism) significantly affect simple adoption decisions, returns from adoption, and technical efficiency in rice production, and that the size of the estimated impacts exceeds that of traditional human capital measures. Greater focus on personality traits relative to cognitive skills may help accelerate innovation diffusion in the short term, and help farmers to respond flexibly to new opportunities and risks in the longer term.
Highlights
As agriculture becomes increasingly technology-intensive, farmers’ ability and willingness to adopt new technologies will be key to productivity growth and structural transformation, which will in turn determine the poverty reduction rate in settings where most of the poor still live in rural areas
The results suggest first that personality traits are highly significant predictors of transplanting adoption, which in turn has a large impact on technical efficiency
We review the literature on determinants of agricultural technology adoption, noting the absence of a discussion of personality traits as potential determinants of adoption decisions
Summary
As agriculture becomes increasingly technology-intensive, farmers’ ability and willingness to adopt new technologies will be key to productivity growth and structural transformation, which will in turn determine the poverty reduction rate in settings where most of the poor still live in rural areas. Conceptual models highlight that, due to spatial dispersion of activities and the need to adjust to microvariations in climate, farming requires entrepreneurial drive, an ability to deal with complexity, and the willingness to take risks (Allen and Lueck 1998) They may only weakly correlate with traditional measures of human capital, skills in this area are likely to significantly affect productivity and technology adoption. Transplanting is a simple technology that, while requiring slightly higher levels of labor input when crops are transplanted from the nursery, has little impact on capital requirements or production risk It can deliver significant benefits in terms of lower seed requirements, improved ability of plants to compete with weeds that reduce labor demands in the.
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