Mobile phones and agricultural market performance in Ethiopia

Despite the widespread belief on the importance of increasing access to information technology - and especially mobile phones - on agricultural market performance in developing countries, there is relatively little solid empirical evidence. Exploiting unique data on wholesale prices and on the spatial and temporal roll-out of mobile phone towers in Ethiopia, we analyze the impact of mobile phone coverage on price dispersion between major cereal markets in the country. We find no signicant impact and link this lack of impact of IT (mobile phones) on agricultural market performance to availability of market information before mobile phones' take-o, to the need for visual inspection of produce because of lack of grades and standards, to and easy storability of cereals. Acknowledgement