Marine Policy 125 (2021) 104385 Available online 29 December 2020 0308-597X/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Full length article Increasing Ghanaian fsh farms’ productivity: Does the use of the internet matter? Martinson Ankrah Twumasi a, * , Yuansheng Jiang a, * , Xiaoshi Zhou b , Bismark Addai c , Kwabena Nkansah Darfor d , Selorm Akaba e , Prince Fosu f a College of Economics, Sichuan Agricultural University, Chengdu-Wenjiang, Huimin road 211, China b School of Economics & Management, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China c College of Economics and Management, Changsha university of Science and Technology, Changsha, China d School of Economics, Department of Applied Economics, University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast, Ghana e School of Agriculture, Department of Economics and Extension, University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast, Ghana f School of Analytics, Finance and Economics, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, USA A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Endogenous treatment regression Internet use Fish farm productivity Ghana ABSTRACT Information and communication and technologies (ICTs) have contributed to national development in recent years. However, less is known on how ICT could help improve productivity in the aquaculture feld. This study investigates how the use of the Internet can help improve fsh farms’ productivity. More specifically, using survey data from two regions in Ghana and the econometric model approach, this study explored the quantitative impacts of Internet use on fsh farm productivity. The results are as follows. First, the study revealed that Internet use is affected by household total land holdings, access to credit and off-farm employment, education, being a member of an association and how household perceives the use of the internet and household head age. Second, regarding the quantitative relationship, Internet use can help increase farm productivity. Compared with males, the impact of female heads’ Internet use on farm productivity is more prominent. Finally, the productivity effect of Internet use for farmers with no access to off-farm work is greater than that for those with off-farm work access. Our fndings provide policy implications to improve farm household Internet use and fsh farms production. 1. Introduction Agriculture is a dominant sector in most developing countries, and it serves as a source of living for at least 53% of the economically active population of Africa [1,2]. An increasingly vital sector of agriculture globally is aquaculture and fsheries, which provides proper nutrition and food security, alleviates poverty, improves livelihoods, generates farm revenue, and creates many job opportunities for small and medium-scale producers [3]. According to Taglioni et al. [4], aquacul- ture is a fast-growing sector in food production that has the prospect of addressing food security and reducing malnutrition globally, especially in developing economies like Ghana. However, in terms of global fsh production, the productivity in African aquaculture production is rela- tively lower than that of other regions [5]. Many scholars and researchers have attributed the low performance in the African region, which include Ghana, to insuffcient capital and human resources, lack of improved farming technology and fsh species, unavailability of quality feeds, low technical training, poor research capacity, and weak market infrastructure and access [5–9]. These challenges are likely to cause a net import of 5 million tons of fsh by 2030 and also likely to push fsh importation higher in 2050 in Africa [10]. Against this backdrop, it is essential to advocate for effcient and effective strategies and policies to maximize fsh productivity in the region. A great deal of these challenges can be addressed by the numerous benefts of adopting information and communication tech- nologies (ICTs) such as computers and smartphones, as posited by pre- vious studies [11–18]. For example, Ma et al. [15] reported that the use of the Internet increases household income and consumption expendi- ture in rural China. The use of the Internet has become vital in this present world. At the * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: twuma2012@gmail.com (M. Ankrah Twumasi), yjiang@sicau.edu.cn (Y. Jiang), zxs@njust.edu.cn (X. Zhou), abismarks@hotmail.com (B. Addai), kdarfor@ucc.edu.gh (K.N. Darfor), sakaba@ucc.edu.gh (S. Akaba), prince.fosu@siu.edu (P. Fosu). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Marine Policy journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/marpol https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2020.104385 Received 15 June 2020; Received in revised form 28 November 2020; Accepted 20 December 2020