Socio-economic Status Difference,Extension Service Accessing And Agricultural Technology Diffusion

Public agricultural technology extension(PATE)plays an important role in promoting agricultural change and is a policy tool supporting agriculture development.However,PATE sector unable to directly supply extension service for all farmers because of limited extension resource in neither developed nor development countries(Evenson,1997).PATE sector generally uses the following extension model:extension staff firstly trains model household and expects exposed household to communicate with model household and imitate technology adoption behavior,and so as to make technology diffuse among households.However,the effectiveness of this extension model has been in debated among scholars recently because that it neglects the impact of socioeconomic status(SES)on PATE accessing and the difference of SES on technology diffusion.This extension medal relatively matches with situation in China.Although farmland transferring accelerates and quantity and farmland proportion possessing by scale operating households have been increasing in recent years,however,the situation that households are numerous,sparse and small scale is still fundamental fact in China(Lin,2017;Goo,2018).Under the realistic constraint that PATE resource is limited so that only a small proportion household could be selected as model household,whether are households possessing higher SES more likely to accessing PATE service and become model household?Whether dose PATE promotes technology adoption of model household?Does model household diffuse technology to exposed household?How does SES difference between model household and exposed household impact agriculture technology diffusion?How should we select model household in order to enhance boost technology diffusion?The article attempts to answer above-mentioned questions based on theory analyses and household survey data.The main contents and conclusions' are as follows:Section One:The impact of socioeconomic status on the accessing of public agriculture technology extension service.In this section,firstly,descriptive statistical analysis is used to calculate the proportion of model household between higher and lower SES households and then compares the SES difference between model and exposed household for institutively obtaining differentiate distribution of PATE service between different SES households;neatly,probit model is adopted to empirically analyze the impact of SES on accessing to PATE service on the condition controlling other factors.The result reveals that under the realistic constraint that PATE resource is limited so that only a small proportion household could be selected as model household,PATE sector tends to select households with higher SES as model household for reducing transaction cost and strenghing model,moreover,households with higher SES are better to obtain PATE service,so the result is that households with higher SES are more likely to access to PATE service compared with households with lower SES.Section Two:The impact of public agricultural technology extension on technology adoption.In this section,firstly,PSM overcoming endogenous problem that the impact of PATE on technology adoption is adopted to estimate the impact of PATE on technology adoption for model household and exposed farmer;next,OLS is used to estimate the heterogeneous impact of PATE on exposed farmer technology adoption.This result reveals that,accessing PATE service enhances technology adoption of demonstration household;neatly,model household diffused non-knowledge-based technology to exposed household,but knowledge-based technology is not diffused;lastly,model household mainly diffused non-knowledge-based technology to exposed household with relatively higher socioeconomic status.Section Three:The impact of differences of overall and elements of socioeconomic status on technology diffusion.In this section,firstly,differences of overall and elements of socioeconomic status between model household and exposed household is calculated,and then probit model is used to estimate the impact of differences of overall and elements of socioeconomic status between model household and exposed household on technology diffusion.The result reveals that,overall difference increasing of socioeconomic status between model household and exposed household has no impact on non-knowledge-based technology diffusion and has negative impact on knowledge-based technology diffusion.For non-knowledge-based technology,the differences increasing in education enhance technology diffusion and the differences increasing in land scale reduce technology diffusion.For knowledge-based technology,the differences increasing in education,social network scale,village cadres holding and county agriculture commitment director knowing enhance agricultural technology diffusion,but the differences increasing in land scale and being cooperative leader reduce agricultural technology diffusion between model household and exposed households.According to above conclusions,main policy suggestions are as follows:firstly,select higher education,stronger social network and opinion leader as model household for raising utilization efficiency of public extension resource;secondly,raise model household's model capacity and incentive for technology diffusion;thirdly,looking at the cooperative correctly,it is not appropriate to exaggerate its model role in agricultural technology extension at present,but select it as model households according to the actual operation of cooperatives;fourthly,we cannot only rely scale household's model effect to diffuse agricultural technology,small household should be mainly selected as model households.