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This article presents the evaluation of the impact of the adoption of improved rice varieties on yield, commercialization, multidimensional poverty, and subjective poverty using data collected from 594 rice producing smallholder farmers in Ethiopia. We adopted an endogenous switching regression model complemented with a propensity score matching methodology to test robustness and reduced selection bias restricting from both observed and unobserved characteristics. The analysis results are consistent across models, indicating that adoption of improved rice varieties has a robust and positive impact on rice yield, and commercialization. Controlling the variations in household characteristics, the average effect of improved rice varieties adoption on productivity was 0.564 t/ha. Similarly, the econometric result showed that improved rice variety adoption decreased multidimensional poverty and subjective poverty by 1.7% and 12.4%, respectively. The government should work with development partners and NGOs to ease the accessibility and expansion of improved rice varieties in rice producing areas of the country. Therefore, policymakers and development organizations should consider improved rice variety adoption as the main strategy to increase productivity, commercialization, and reduce poverty of the rice farm households.
Assaye et al. (Wed,) studied this question.