E-commerce Adoption and Technical Efficiency of Wheat Production in China

Abstract

Improving technical efficiency (TE) is crucial for the sustainable growth of smallholder agriculture in developing countries. While there has been a large literature investigating the determinants of smallholders’ agricultural technical efficiency, little is known about the effect of e-commerce on agriculture and crop production efficiency despite the growing importance of rural e-commerce in developing countries. This study, therefore, bridges the research gap by examining the impact of e-commerce adoption on TE using household survey data of wheat farmers in China. We employ the combination of propensity score matching (PSM) and a selectivity-corrected stochastic production frontier model to address the possible selection biases stemming from both observable and unobservable factors. We found that e-commerce adoption would lead to a 2.75 per cent increase in the technical efficiency of wheat production. Our study also complements the existing research of rural e-commerce, which mainly focuses on the benefits of e-commerce from the perspective of market opportunity and farmers’ welfare.

Economic efficiency of small-scale wheat production in Jigawa state, Nigeria

“…The foundation for achieving national food security and poverty alleviation goals is efficient production, especially in areas of the nation with the greatest potential for producing major food crops (Asfaw et al, 2019). However, inefficient agricultural production and disparities in producer efficiency deter farmers from increasing output (Asfaw et al, 2019;Chen et al, 2022;Dessale, 2019). When there is inefficiency, attempts to introduce new knowledge may not have the desired effect because the available knowledge is not being used effectively.…”

Do outsourcing services provided by agricultural cooperatives affect technical efficiency? Insights from tobacco farmers in China

“…Additionally, there has been extensive literature on agricultural technical efficiency. However, these studies mainly focus on the relationship between technical efficiency and farmers’ participation in cooperatives (Lin et al., 2022, Ma et al., 2018, Kumar et al., 2018), e‐commerce adoption (Chen et al., 2022), environmental services (Rodríguez et al., 2022), machinery‐sharing arrangements (Larsén, 2010), technology adoption (Qiao and Huang, 2020), agricultural training (Nguyen‐Van and To‐The, 2016) and off‐farm employment (Yang et al., 2015). Others study the relationship between technical efficiency and land fragmentation (Tan, 2005) or technical efficiency and land transfers (Deininger et al., 2013, Ma et al., 2017b, Jin and Jayne, 2013).…”

Modelo de aceptación tecnológica en los canales digitales para la adquisición de productos agrícolas frescos

“…Si bien es cierto que se han llevado a cabo estrategias de promoción del comercio electrónico de bienes agrarios (Yang et al, 2020;Chen et al, 2022), estas iniciativas se han desarrollado desde un enfoque de oferta, en el que se motiva al productor hacia el uso de las TIC y la implementación del e-commerce para la venta de sus productos. No obstante, el éxito de estas estrategias depende no solo de la oferta, sino también de la adopción e implementación de estas tecnologías por parte del consumidor (Mazon-Olivo et al, 2018).…”