Location and uptake: integrated household and GIS analysis of technology adoption and land use, with application to smallholder dairy farms in Kenya

CIS‐derived measures of location and space have increasingly been used in models of land use and ecology. However, they have made few inroads into the literature on technology adoption in developing countries, which continues to rely mainly on survey‐derived information. Location, with all its dimensions of market access, demographics and agro‐climate, nevertheless remains key to understanding potential for technology use. The measures of location typically used in the adoption literature, such as locational dummy variables that proxy a range of locational factors, now appear relatively crude given the increased availability of more explicit GIs‐derived measures. This paper attempts to demonstrate the usefulness of integrating CIS‐measures into analysis of technology uptake, for better differentiating and understanding locational effects. A set of GIs‐derived measures of market access and agro‐climate are included in a standard household model of technology uptake, applied to smallholder dairy farms in Kenya, using a sample of 3330 geo‐referenced farm households. The three technologies examined are keeping of dairy cattle, planting of specialised fodder, and use of concentrate feed. Logit estimations are conducted that significantly differentiate effects of individual household characteristics from those related to location. The predicted values of the locational variables are then used to make spatial predictions of technology potential. Comparisons are made with estimations based only on survey data, which demonstrate that while overall explanatory power may not improve with CIS‐derived variables, the latter yield more practical interpretations, which is further demonstrated through predictions of technology uptake change with a shift in infrastructure policy. Although requiring large geo‐referenced data sets and high resolution GIS layers, the methodology demonstrates the potential to better unravel the multiple effects of location on farmer decisions on technology and land use.     

The impact of mining and smelting activities on property values: a study of Mount Isa city,Queensland, Australia

Much publicity has been given to the problem of high levels of environmental contaminants, most notably high blood lead concentration levels among children in the city of Mount Isa because of mining and smelting activities. The health impacts from mining‐related pollutants are now well documented. This includes published research being discussed in an editorial of the Medical Journal of Australia (see Munksgaard et al. 2010 ). On the other hand, negative impacts on property prices, although mentioned, have not been examined to date. This study rectifies this research gap. This study uses a hedonic property price approach to examine the impact of mining‐ and smelting‐related pollution on nearby property prices. The hypothesis is that those properties closer to the lead and copper smelters have lower property (house) prices than those farther away. The results of the study show that the marginal willingness to pay to be farther from the pollution source is AUS $13 947 per kilometre within the 4 km radius selected. The study has several policy implications, which are discussed briefly. We used ordinary least squares, geographically weighted regression, spatial error and spatial autoregressive or spatial lag models for this analysis.