“Price Information, Inter-Village Networks, and 'Bargaining Spillovers': Experimental Evidence from Ghana,” with Hildebrandt, N., Romagnoli, G., and Soldani, E., (2020).
Through a randomized experiment and detailed data on communications among farmers, we identify the impact of text-messages-based commodity price information on rural farmers’ revenues. The intervention affected prices received by farmers in two ways: (1) a long-lasting increase (9%) for treated farmers, and (2) substantial indirect benefits for certain control group farmers, which cannot be explained by classical informational spillovers. We discuss a novel mechanism of bargaining spillovers which can explain such positive externalities, even in the absence of information sharing between the treatment and control groups. Our results highlight the importance of accounting for longer-run spillovers and the potential of ICT interventions in emerging markets.
Keren Neza, Yaw Nyarko, Angela Orozco. “Digital Trading and Market Platforms: Ghana Case Study” in Madon T., Anderson R.J., Casaburi L., Lee K., Rezaee A., Gadgil A.J. (eds.), An Introduction to Development Engineering, Springer, 2021.
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Chakraborty, S., Jabbar, Z., Subramanian, L., and Nyarko, Y., (2016). Satellite Image Analytics, Land Change and Food Security. ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Data Science for Food, Energy and Water (DSFEW), Co-located with KDD 2016, San Francisco, USA.
In this paper, we present the design of a satellite image analytics engine that we use to perform a detailed analysis of changes in agricultural land patterns over a 13-year time period (2000-2012) in West Bengal, India, traditionally considered one of the most fertile areas in the world.
Ahmad, T., Reed-Sanchez, E., Zarinni, F., Afutu, A., Adjaho, K., Nyarko, Y., & Subramanian, L. (2018, June). GreenApps: A Platform For Cellular Edge Applications. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies, (p. 45). ACM.
This paper presents the design, implementation and deployment of GreenApps, a ground-up platform that enables off-grid, near off-line and highly available cellular applications in rural contexts. The GreenApps platform has been deployed in two rural regions in Kumawu, Ghana and Pearl Lagoon, Nicaragua and supports different community-centric applications.
Chakraborty, S., Dalton, S., Nyarko, Y., and Subramanian, L., (2012). Computing the Rate of Disappearance of Cropland Using Satellite Images. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Computational Sustainability, Denmark.
Apart from human-led development, changing climate is also leading towards a change in the land pattern. In both scenarios, a solution to the problem can be a monitoring tool, which can identify the change in land pattern over the years. In this paper, we present a tool that can monitor this change through satellite images.
Nyarko, Y. (2017). Transforming Rural Africa - Economics, Technology and Governance. Journal of African Development, 19(1), 160-167.
AFEA/ASSA Luncheon Speech
Nyarko, Y. (2016). Rural Agricultural Markets: A Case Study in Ghana. Working paper prepared for the International Growth Centre (London School of Economics).
In this report we describe the start of a pilot baseline study of the soon to be established Ghana commodity exchange.
Nyarko, Y. (2016). Commodity Exchanges in Africa: Transforming African Agriculture and Finance (Policy Brief). International Growth Center (London School of Economics).
The Ghana government has recently decided to establish a commodities exchange and warehouse receipt system to improve the welfare of farmers.
Chakraborty, S., Tong, T., Chen, J., Aman, A., Mufti, T., Nyarko, Y., & Subramanian, L. (2013). Experiences in Designing a Mobile GIS Mapping Tool for Rural Farmers in Ghana. Proceedings of the 4th Annual Symposium on Computing for Development, ACM, p. 28.
The task of balancing problems associated with population growth and food production has often been impaired by a lack of accurate information on food supply availability in any given region or time.
Nyarko, Y. “The New Growth Theory.” Fundamental Economics- Volume I (EOLSS), edited by Majumdar et al., UNESCO, 2002.
This paper very briefly summarizes some of the new growth theory in economics. The emphasis will be on the role of knowledge in the growth process.
Jovanovic, B., & Nyarko, Y. “Research and Productivity.” Creation and Transfer of Knowledge, edited by Navaretti et al., Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 1995.
We model research as a signal on an unknown parameter of a technology. We distinguish applied from basic research and show that firms in the same industry can optimally choose different research portfolios, and that basic research van seem to have a higher rate of return than applied research, even though it really doesn’t - essentially, firms on a “fast track” upgrading policy opt for basic research but fast and slow-track upgrading policies can coexist in a long-run equilibrium.