THE RETURNS FROM RESEARCH IN AUSTRALIAN BROADACRE AGRICULTURE*

Many people share the view that too little is invested in R & D in agriculture. The relationship between several measures of productivity and research expenditure was estimated using data from ABARE's surveys of broadacre industries and a new data series on R & D expenditure for the period 1953 to 1988. The internal rate of return to research was estimated to be in the range of 15 to 40 percent which does not provide strong evidence that Australia is either under- or over-investing in public research.     

SYMPOSIUM ON PROJECT APPRAISAL IN LESSER DEVELOPED COUNTRIES: NUFFIELD COLLEGE RESEARCH ON PROJECT ANALYSIS IN AGRICULTURE

This paper discusses the O.E.C.D. Manual of Industrial Project Analysis for Developing Countries by Professor Mirrlees and myself, and the extension to agriculture of its guidelines for project evaluation, a subject now being explored at Nuffield College. Since the principles of cost-benefit analysis are very general, the question arises as to why it was restricted, in the O.E.C.D. Title at least, to developing countries and to industrial projects.     

FACTOR SUBSTITUTION IN AUSTRALIAN AGRICULTURE

Studies of the ease of substitution between inputs in production have generally been carried out within a production framework of an explicit functional form. In this study, a somewhat different approach is followed. A model of derived demand for primary factors of production, land, labour and capital is formulated to enable inferences to be made about the characteristics of the unspecified production function. The model is used to obtain estimates of the pairwise Allen-Uzawa substitution elasticities which are secondary parameters of the underlying production function. The reported FIML estimates from aggregate time series data for the period 1920/21 to 1969/70 indicate very low and marginally different substitution elasticities between different pairs of factors, suggesting that both the Cobb-Douglas and CES production function specifications for the Australian agricultural sector are inappropriate.     

RETIREMENT POLICY IN FRENCH AGRICULTURE

A supplementary retirement grant (I. V.D.) has been the most important of a range of measures introduced since 1962 as a solution to social and structural problems in French agriculture. Although one-third of the country's agricultural area has been transferred through the scheme, there has been no revolutionary change in farm sizes. The restructuring required by the policy has been relatively slight and the economic attractions of the retirement grant have declined, particularly since the early 1970's. Problems have also arisen from the uneven spatial adoption of the pension, from internal contradictions within the scheme and from the lack of co-ordination with other aspects of government support for agriculture and regional development policy.     

产业化——安徽省农业可持续发展的定位

为促进农村经济发展，农民增收，要大力推进农业产业化经营；在分析安徽省农业经济的现状和农业产业化面临的主要问题的基础上，提出了加快农业产业化进程，实现安徽省农业可持续发展的建议。     

AGRICULTURE IN THE NEW RUSSIAN FEDERATION

The causes of the present crisis are sought in the historical origins of the role of agriculture in the forced march to industrialisation by the USSR and in the impact of the recent, post-Soviet reforms on agriculture. The collapse is compared with the damage inflicted on farming in the Second World War but it is also noted that the recent decline in farming is not so severe as that in industry. Some of the essential preconditions for recovery are briefly considered.     

WORLD AGRICULTURE IN DISARRAY REVISITED*

In World Agriculture in Disarray I argued that the result of government intervention in agriculture would be to increase the costs of farm policies to taxpayers and consumers and to restrict agricultural trade. A review of the current situation in world agriculture confirms these projections. The policies of the major countries in relation to agriculture have clearly not succeeded in their aims and at the same time have created many problems, particularly in the sphere of agricultural trade. The solution to the crisis in the farm sector must take account of the inherent characteristics of agriculture itself.     

积极稳妥地推进我国农业现代化建设

到下世纪中叶,我国农业现代化发展可划分为“初步实现”和“基本实现”两个阶段目标。当前应通过深化改革,以加快农业现代化的进程。同时,本文还提出了推进我国农业现代化建设的政策建议     

MEASURING PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH IN AUSTRALIAN BROADACRE AGRICULTURE

An important source of growth for Australian broadacre agriculture has been technical progress. We compare alternative measures of productivity growth including the traditional Tornqvist-Thiel total factor productivity index; variants of this approach that allow decreasing returns to scale; the Fisher ideal index; other nonparametric measures that do not impose particular functional forms and an econometric estimate from a translog industry cost function. The annual growth in productivity in broadacre agriculture over the period from 1953 to 1994 was in the range of 2.4 to 2.6 per cent and hence was quite robust to measurement technique.