ABSTRACT
Despite the evidence that technological innovation has been fundamental to growth and development of agriculture around the world, there is a dearth of research on the role of climate as a stimulus for innovation of technologies. It has been argued that lessons about climate adaptation come from our ability to understand the process of the existing technological innovation and its role in enabling farmers to cope with climatic challenges. Observing India’s district-level time-series data over 12 years, I study the extent to which technological innovations have provided farmers with options to substitute for climate deciencies to stabilise and enhance rice (Oryza sativa L.) productivity in regions with a sub-optimal climate. Drawing upon the hypothesis of induced innovation, which states that the direction of technological innovation in agriculture is induced by differences in relative resource endowments, my goal is to investigate whether spatial variations in climatic resources prompted the development of location-specic technologies that substituted for climatic limitations in the rice-based cropping system of India.
