Digital financial inclusion (DFI) has been widely recognized for its potential role in reducing poverty by fostering entrepreneurship. However, whether DFI benefits all social classes equally remains an open question. Integrating technology adoption and income stratification research, this study investigates the impact of DFI on income stratification – specifically lower-, middle-, and upper-income classes – across key entrepreneurial stages, including venture creation, investment, and performance. Using data from 36,557 household-wave observations in the China Household Financial Survey (CHFS), we find that (1) lower-class households are less likely to establish entrepreneurial ventures compared to upper-class households but are more likely to do so than middle-class households, and (2) they make lower investments in entrepreneurial ventures compared to their upper-class counterparts, and experience lower entrepreneurial performance than middle- and upper-class households. The results also show that, whereas DFI positively influences entrepreneurial venture creation, investment, and performance for lower-class households, these effects are less pronounced compared to those observed in middle- and upper-class households. The study advances an integrated view of DFI by examining its differential impacts across income classes and entrepreneurial stages and contributes to the ongoing debate about its effectiveness as a universal poverty reduction solution.

Blockchain technology has attracted attention from public sector agencies, mainly for its perceived potential to improve transparency, data integrity, and administrative processes. However, its concrete value and applicability within government settings remain contested, and real-world adoption has been limited and uneven. This raises questions regarding the conditions that promote or impede adoption at the institutional level. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis is employed in this research to explore how the combined effects of national-level regulatory clarity, financial provision, digital readiness, and ecosystem engagement shape patterns of blockchain adoption in the European public sector. Rather than identifying any single factor as decisive, our findings reveal a plurality of institutional paths leading to high adoption intensity, with regulatory certainty and European Union funding appearing most frequently on high-consistency paths. In contrast, digital readiness indicators and national research and development budgets are substitutable, challenging resource-based perceptions of technology adoption and supporting a configurational understanding that accounts for institutional interdependence and contextuality. We argue that policy strategies cannot look for overall readiness but should place key institutional strengths relative to local conditions and public value objectives.

Minimum tillage potato production with rice straw mulching was widely promoted in Vietnam during the 2010s for efficient land use in the winter fallow season. This study evaluates the current adoption status 15 years after its introduction by a qualitative case study consisting of desk review, phone interviews and in-depth interviews, and field observation. Findings reveal that the original practice has been discontinued after initial adoption, primarily attributed to the adoption of rice harvesters and power tillers. The reasons for discontinuation differ from those for other conservation agriculture practices like zero tillage maize or wheat production, emphasizing the importance of tailored approaches for each crop and locality. Some farmers have adapted the method to fit their specific conditions in which the principles of conservation agriculture have been maintained. Those findings underscore the need for continual refinement of agricultural innovations along with socioeconomic and agroecological changes. Drawing on insights from the case of Vietnam, the study proposes a scaling strategy for South Asia where there is increasing interest in promoting potato zero tillage rice straw mulching.

The adoption of anaerobic digesters (ADs) and technologies stacked with them (AD+) has the potential to offer benefits to dairy producers and the environment. Production of biochar, hydrochar, and bioplastics can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, offer economic benefits to farmers through the sale of value-added products, reduce the need for fertilizer purchases, and promote a circular economy for dairy producers. We use a diffusion of innovations framework augmented to include economic, environmental, social, and regulatory considerations in addition to the operational aspects of the technologies. We conducted interviews with 21 participants representing for-profit, not-for-profit, governmental, and community service agencies in Idaho, the third-largest U.S. dairy state. Semi-structured interviews explored participants’ experiences with and perceptions of how relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, observability, trialability, environmental, economic, and social factors may facilitate or hinder the adoption of AD and three related emerging AD+ technologies. Interviews were analyzed using inductive coding and thematic analysis. Results show that participants were familiar with the need to address dairy manure waste and were interested in the potential benefits to farm revenue and the environment. However, the same factors associated with the relatively low adoption of AD in Idaho may also hinder the adoption of newer AD+ technologies. These include a lack of observability and trialability, installation and maintenance costs, access to technology, uncertain environmental impacts, unrealized economic benefits to dairy producers, and regulatory burden.

Climate change has been shown to affect different aspects of society, with agriculture and the food system taking the highest hit. Several initiatives have been put in place to dampen such effects. Climate education could play an important role in the fight against climate change. Climate education ensures that farmers understand the anthropogenic causes of climate change and the principles underlying adaptation measures, hence informing adoption of sound adaptation measures. Although such theoretical underpinnings are clear, empirical evidence is lacking. We employ a multivariate probit model to empirically investigate the role of climate education in adoption of climate adaptation practices using data from Cameroon, whose humid tropical agroecology and forests are crucial to climate change mitigation in the Congo basin. Employing a linear model, we similarly evaluate the role of climate education on farm incomes as well as the role of perception of climate change. Our results show that climate education influences adoption of adaptation measures, especially simple and cost-effective measures. However, climate education does not affect farm income, neither does farmers’ perception of climate change. These results suggest that indigenous farmers may be more willing to choose a simple low-cost adaptation measure. The generated results are crucial for influencing climate change policy related to awareness building, education, and training for optimal adaptation efforts.

For almost eight decades, productivity in the United States agricultural sector has substantially increased, in large extent due to the adoption of technological innovations. Despite the increased utilization of technology, questions remain regarding which producers are more likely to adopt a greater number of technological innovations. This research seeks to understand how commodity diversification strategies, farm characteristics, producer perceptions of risk, conservation, information sources, climate adaptation, and producer demographic characteristics are associated with technology adoption among beef cattle producers in the Southeast United States. Utilizing data from an online survey and an Ordered Probit model, we show that beef cattle producers who also produce fruit have an increased probability of adopting a greater number of technologies. The opposite effect is found for other commodities such as vegetables, row crops, and other livestock. Policy recommendations are also discussed.

Ensuring energy access for rural households is crucial for global sustainable development. Technologies like liquefied petroleum gas, biogas, and efficient cookers are touted as solutions, yet their adoption remains limited despite their potential health, economic, and environmental benefits. We conducted a meta-analysis of 50 studies in developing countries, integrating contextual factors to explore gender and other determinants impacting rural energy transition. Our findings underscore socioeconomic status, social capital, environmental concerns, and gender dynamics as pivotal factors. Notably, women's involvement boosts adoption rates by 7.90 per cent, yet cultural barriers often sideline them from these processes. Thus, our recommendations stress addressing women's roles as energy technology users to foster inclusive energy transitions.

The Eastern Gangetic Plains are a densely populated region of South Asia with comparatively low productivity yet a strong potential to intensify production to meet growing food demands. Conservation agriculture-based sustainable intensification (CASI) has gained academic and policy traction in the region, yet despite considerable promotional activities, uptake remains limited. Based on emerging evidence delving beyond a binary classification of adoption, this qualitative study seeks to explore the experiences and perspectives of smallholder farmers who express positive sentiments about CASI, yet have not progressed to (autonomous) adoption. After thematic coding of semi-structured interviews with 44 experimenting farmers and 38 interested non-users, ten common themes emerged that explain why farmers stagnate in their adoption process. Seven of the ten themes were non-specific to CASI and would constraint promotion and uptake of any agri-system change, highlighting the need for contextual clarity when promoting practice changes in smallholder systems. We summaries this to propose the ‘four T's’ that are required to be addressed to enable agricultural change in smallholder systems: Targeting; Training; Targeted incentives; and Time. Through this more nuanced evaluation approach, we argue the need for a stronger focus on enabling environments rather than technological performance evaluations generically, if promotional efforts are to be successful and emerging sustainable intensification technologies are to be adopted by smallholder farmers.

This paper studies the impact of technological progress on unemployment in a search-matching model with heterogeneous multiworker firms. In the model, some firms continue to reap rewards from new technologies over time and contribute to job creation, while other firms obsolesce and reduce their employment. Thus, the model captures an endogenous change in the aggregate composition of firms (the firm-composition effect). Considering this effect along with the two canonical effects—the capitalization and creative-destruction effects—I examine the importance of each through a simulation. The results show that the firm-composition effect explains almost all the variation in unemployment in the model, mainly through shrinking the number of obsolescing firms relative to surviving firms and increasing the aggregate technology adoption rate when technology progresses rapidly.

Integrating farmers’ preferences into the breeding and dissemination of new genotypes is a effective approach to enhance their successful adoption by farmers. In the case of sweet potato, a staple crop in many parts of West Africa, there is a need for more research on the selection criteria used by farmers when choosing which varieties to grow. This study aims to highlight farmers’ selection criteria for sweet potato varieties in the main production areas in Benin. A total of 480 farmers from the top three sweet potato production areas were surveyed. The relative importance of various traits for sweet potato farmers was evaluated using best-worst scaling methods. Latent class analysis was applied to find groups of farmers with similar preferences. Best-Worst Scaling analysis revealed that high root yield, root size, marketability, and early maturing were the most important variety selection criteria. Latent class analysis revealed three farmers’ groups referred to as ‘Yield potential’, ‘Market value’, and ‘Plant resilience’ classes. ‘Yield potential’ farmers were more likely to be from Atlantique and Alibori departments; they significantly committed more acreage to sweet potato production. The ‘Market value’ farmers highlighted the variety of root size and commercial value as the main selection criteria and consisted of farmers with primary education levels from the Ouémé department. ‘Plant resilience’ refers to a group of Alibori farmers who prioritize environmental issues and primarily grow sweet potatoes for self-consumption. Our findings shed light on farmers’ preferences and suggested that heterogeneity in sweet potato selection criteria was highly influenced by various socio-economic factors and location.

Low and slow adoption of innovative technologies among smallholder farmers in Tunisia is a key agricultural development problem partly related to the existing technology transfer approach used in the country. The objective of this study is to analyse how to design innovative technology transfer strategies more effective in terms of increasing female and male farmers’ adoption of an improved barley variety, ‘Kounouz’, for small ruminant nutrition. A randomised controlled trial method was used with farmers in Tunisia to implement four extension treatments and to evaluate their effects on adoption of Kounouz. Difference-in-difference estimates showed that intensive agricultural trainings can significantly improve adoption of Kounouz. Technical trainings combined with economic and organisational training and female empowerment courses resulted in a higher adoption rate. This finding has important policy implications, because it suggests that ensuring more widespread and equitable adoption of improved technologies may not require changes in the research system, but rather introduction measures that ensure better access for women to gender-sensitive extension programmes given their positive impacts on technology adoption of the household.

The development of transformative technologies for mitigating our global environmental and technological challenges will require significant innovation in the design, development, and manufacturing of advanced materials and chemicals. To achieve this innovation faster than what is possible by traditional human intuition-guided scientific methods, we must transition to a materials informatics-centered paradigm, in which synergies between data science, materials science, and artificial intelligence are leveraged to enable transformative, data-driven discoveries faster than ever before through the use of predictive models and digital twins. While materials informatics is experiencing rapidly increasing use across the materials and chemicals industries, broad adoption is hindered by barriers such as skill gaps, cultural resistance, and data sparsity. We discuss the importance of materials informatics for accelerating technological innovation, describe current barriers and examples of good practices, and offer suggestions for how researchers, funding agencies, and educational institutions can help accelerate the adoption of urgently needed informatics-based toolsets for science in the 21st century.

Bolivia has disseminated several improved technologies in the rice sector, but the average rice productivity in the country is far below the average trend in Latin America in recent years. Although the economic literature has highlighted the role of agricultural technology adoption in increasing agricultural productivity, gaps remain in understanding how rice growers are deciding to adopt and benefit from available improved rice technologies. Most previous adoption studies have evaluated the uptake of individual technologies without paying attention to the complementarities that alternative improved rice technologies may offer to farmers who face multiple marketing and production needs. This study uses data from a nationally representative sample of Bolivian rice growers to analyze farmers' joint decisions in adopting complementary agricultural technologies controlling for potential correlations across these decisions, as well as the extent of adoption of these practices. Evidence suggests that the decisions on multiple technology adoption are closely related, with common factors affecting both adoption and the extent of adoption. Furthermore, there is a need to better target resource-poor farmers, improve information-diffusion channels on agricultural practices, and better use existing farmers' organizations to enhance rice technology adoption.

Recently, Penn World Tables include new data that enable calculation of total factor productivity in addition to output for a large set of countries. We use these new data to examine convergence and divergence across countries by applying a new approach, which differentiates between the dynamics of output and of productivity. Our empirical results lead to two main new contributions to the literature. The first is on the interpretation of “β-convergence” in “growth regressions.” It means that output per worker in each country converges to productivity but does not imply convergence across countries, since productivity tends to diverge from the global frontier. The second contribution is to the literature, which finds that income gaps across countries are due mainly to differential technology adoption. This paper shows that the gaps in technology are not only large but keep growing over time.

This study measures the effect of text message receipt on behavioral change by Ecuadorean blackberry farmers. We examine whether text messages affect knowledge about specific technologies or serve as reminders to farmers to employ practices as part of their crop management strategy. Drawing from well-known theories of behavioral change, we identify pathways relevant to technology adoption. We then describe results from a randomized experiment and measure the impact of the intervention through these pathways. Results suggest that in the blackberry context, timely text messages remind farmers about recommended practices and increase adoption. Effects on knowledge enhancement are not significant.

This paper examines ex-ante impacts of two policy interventions that improve productivity of local-breed cows through artificial insemination (AI) and producers’ access to distant markets through a dairy market hub. The majority of cattle in Kilosa district in Tanzania are local low productivity breeds kept by smallholders and agro-pastoralists. Milk production is seasonal, which constrains producers’ access to distant urban markets, constrains producers’ incomes and restricts profitability in dairy processing. We developed and evaluated an integrated system dynamics (SD) simulation model that captures many relevant feedbacks between the biological dynamics of dairy cattle production, the economics of milk market access, and the impacts of rainfall as an environmental factor. Our analysis indicated that in the short (1 year) and medium (5-year) term, policy interventions have a negative effect on producers’ income due to high AI costs. However, in the long term (5+ years), producers’ income from dairy cattle activities markedly increases (by, on average, 7% per year). The results show the potential for upgrading the smallholder dairy value chain in Kilosa, but achievement of this result may require financial support to producers in the initial stages (first 5 years) of the interventions, particularly to offset AI costs, as well as additional consideration of post-farm value chain costs. Furthermore, institutional aspects of dairy market hub have substantial effects on trade-offs amongst performance measures (e.g. higher profit vs. milk consumption at producer's household) with gain in cumulative profit coming at the expense of a proportional and substantial reduction in home milk consumption.

In the first quarter of the new millennium, the immersive technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR) are only a few steps away from becoming the mainstream tools within the design industry. This study investigated the internal and external barriers of technology adoption within design-oriented businesses. A mixed method was used to collect and analyze the data from the employees of a large design firm. This research confirmed that external barriers such as funding, technical support, training, and business strategy that exist at the organizational level are interrelated with the internal barriers such as designers’ and managers’ perception and attitude toward the new technologies. The managerial applications were discussed later and the directions for future research were provided.

Although, the knowledge management (KM)-culture research has helped to validate the importance of cultural values for companies' KM initiatives and provided insights into some important values, it still lacks frameworks and analysis outlining how specific types of cultural values might relate to Knowledge Management system (KMS) adoption and subsequent outcomes. In this paper, we provide a three-dimensional framework to help managers articulate how culture affects their unit's ability to create, transfer, and apply knowledge through KMS use. To illustrate the application of the framework, we also present an exploratory case study we have performed in an international organization in the area of development assistance and capacity development.