Faculty Seminar Series:”Market Access, Trade Costs, and Technology Adoption: Evidence from Northern Tanzania”

Shilpa Aggarwal, an assistant professor at the Indian School of Business, presented her research paper titled  “Market Access, Trade Costs, and Technology Adoption: Evidence from Northern Tanzania,” which quantifies the impact of market access in rural Tanzania on agricultural productivity.

Speaking to an audience of students, faculty and staff, Aggarwal introduced the purpose of the study, saying: “It has been known for some time that agricultural productivity in Sub Saharan Africa [SSA] is low even for the developing world, with data showing stagnation since the 1960s while other regions have been galloping ahead. The question is, why?”

Explaining that there are many reasons for this trend, she noted that in particular, “Market access is poor in SSA due to poor transport infrastructure that reduces access to fertilizers needed to boost crop yields, which is the primary explanation for low productivity.” Her co-authored research seeks to provide empirical evidence to explain how remoteness and poor market access has this effect.

Over the course of the seminar, she layed out the rigorous collection  and analysis of data  from two regions – Kilimanjaro and Manyara – of Northern Tanzania, which represent 6 percent of the land area and population of the country. Using a random sample of farmers, villages, transportation suppliers, and fertilizer sellers, they studied the entire supply chain of maize production, the primary crop of the geographical sample, including the cost to procure fertilizer, to determine market access for farmers.

The research findings estimate that reducing travel costs by 50%, the approximate effect of paving rural roads, would double the use of the fertilizers needed to boost crop yields.

The paper was jointly authored with Brian Giera (Amazon Research), Dahyeon Jeong (University of California, Santa Cruz), Alan Spearot (University of California, Santa Cruz), and Jon Robinson (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Read the full paper here>>

Faculty Seminars

The GU-Q Faculty Seminars are an annual series in which GU-Q faculty and guests present research in progress and receive feedback from other faculty members. The central goal is to further faculty’s research by offering opportunities both to present ideas and to learn from the ideas of others from GU-Q, Education City, and beyond.