Impact of Rural Road Improvement on High Yield Variety Technology Adoption: Evidence from Bangladesh

Rural road improvement that enhances access to input and output markets and agricultural extension services may aid agricultural technology adoption. There is a growing body of literature on the impact of rural roads on technology adoption. However, most studies have so far relied on cross-sectional surveys comparing households with and without road improvement, which have causal attribution problems. This paper uses a quasi-experimental household panel survey data conducted in 1995/96 and 2000 (pre and post road improvement) for 753 project households and 325 comparable control households in Bangladesh. It tests the hypothesis that road improvement increases HYV rice acreage and decreases local variety rice acreage. The results indicate that road improvement encourages households to increase aggregate rice acreage as well as acreage for high yield variety rice. This paper does not find a statistically significant impact on local variety rice acreage.