Agricultural technology adoption and child nutrition enhancement: improved maize varieties in rural Ethiopia
利用埃塞俄比亚农村家庭调查数据，评估改良玉米品种采纳对儿童营养的影响，发现采纳显著改善儿童身高和体重指标，且对营养最差的儿童效果最大，主要渠道是增加自家玉米消费。
Adoption of improved crop varieties can lead to multiple benefits to farm households, including increased productivity, incomes, and food consumption. However, possible impacts of adoption on child nutrition outcomes are rarely explored in the literature. This article helps bridge this gap through an impact assessment of the adoption of improved maize varieties (IMVs) on child nutrition outcomes using a recent household survey from rural Ethiopia. The conceptual linkage between IMV adoption and child nutrition is first established using an agricultural household model. Instrumental variable estimation suggests the overall impacts of adoption on child height-for-age and weight-for-age z-scores to be positive and significant. Quantile instrumental variable regressions further reveal that such impacts are largest among children with poorest nutrition outcomes. Finally, by combining a decomposition procedure with system of equations estimation, it is found that the increase in own-produced maize consumption is the major channel through which IMV adoption affects child nutrition.