Productivity impacts of hybrid rice seeds in Vietnam

Abstract

AbstractExpanding the availability of hybrid rice varieties has been regarded as the most important measure addressing food security in developing Asian countries. The success story of hybrid rice production in China motivated the Vietnamese government to import hybrid seeds in an effort to increase rice productivity. Despite increased use of hybrid rice seeds and rising input intensity, rice productivity growth has slowed since 2006. Using a ten‐year balanced panel of households with changing adoption status, we estimate productivity impacts of hybrid rice adoption. We combine propensity score matching in adoption decisions with fixed‐effects estimators to control for heterogeneity in farming household and farmland characteristics. The frontier models are specified to allow for direct comparisons of the base productivity, factor productivity, and technical efficiency between hybrid and the current high‐yielding varieties. Our major finding is that hybrid rice varieties provide no productivity superiority over high‐yielding inbred seeds in our sample. A substantial technical efficiency gap (35%) exists in rice production, suggesting a potential benefit of improvements in management skills with the existing technology.