Matched Savings and the Sustained Adoption of Improved Technologies

• Development Workshop

Date and Location

Monday, May 5, 2014, 4:10 PM - 5:30 PM
ARE Conference Room, 2102 Social Sciences and Humanities

Abstract

This paper evaluates the impact of two types of interventions: Matched Savings (MS) and vouchers. In a field experiment involving 1,646 rural households in Mozambique, one third of the communities were randomly assigned to savings treatment, which offered financial education, and in another third of the communities the beneficiaries received a MS treatment, which added a 50% match on savings between harvest and planting season to the savings treatment. Besides this, in each village, half of the households in the study were randomly selected to receive a voucher providing a 73% subsidy for fertilizer and improved maize seeds. We find that both the MS and the voucher succeeded at significantly increasing the input use, agricultural production, consumption and assets of their beneficiaries. However we find that the complementarity between the two interventions is negative, meaning that the benefits from receiving both MS and vouchers is less than the sum of the gain from each intervention.