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THE PATH OF TECHNOLOGY DIFFUSION: WHICH NEIGHBORS TO LEARN FROM?
Author(s) -
Zhang Xiaobo,
Fan Shenggen,
Cai Ximing
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
contemporary economic policy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.454
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1465-7287
pISSN - 1074-3529
DOI - 10.1093/cep/20.4.470
Subject(s) - proxy (statistics) , early adopter , panel data , diffusion , econometrics , aggregate (composite) , diffusion of innovations , economics , business , economic geography , computer science , marketing , statistics , mathematics , physics , thermodynamics , materials science , composite material
This study uses a panel data set of 25 years over 280 districts in rural India and applies a geographic information systems (GIS) program to investigate the regional neighborhood effect on the rate of diffusion of new technologies. The results show that in the technology diffusion process, the early successful adopters have a larger effect on neighboring adopters than do the early unsuccessful adopters. Hence, use of the aggregate or the simple average of adoption rate among neighborhoods as a proxy for the neighborhood effect, a common practice in the learning literature, may be inappropriate. We also find that education and irrigation play important roles in facilitating technology diffusion.