Persistent Underinvestment in Public Agricultural Research

It is often argued that public support of agricultural research is inadequate. However, the empirical papers that support this hypothesis rarely reflect formal behavioral theory capable of explaining this phenomenon. This paper presents a theory that explains underfunding, namely, that funding agencies respond too slowly to secular changes in the value of research. A model of farmer and funding agency behavior is presented, and shown to imply that actual research funding will be consistently smaller than optimal funding. The assumptions and results of the model are explained in terms of the institutional literature on public agricultural research agencies.     

Quantifying Structural Change in U.S. Agriculture: The Case of Research and Productivity

Previous work on structural change in agriculture has failed to distinguish long-run trends from structural breaks leading to new trends. We measure structural changes as statistically significant breaks in either stochastic or deterministic time trends, and apply these measures to agricultural productivity and research. Productivity has a break in 1925 accompanying agriculture's early experience with the Great Depression. Research trends shifted in 1930 as the Depression and new technology began to strongly influence efficient farm size and capitalization. After modeling lags between research and productivity impacts in a vector autoregression (VAR), we compare our results to earlier work by developing a procedure to estimate the rate of return to research from the impulse response function of the VAR.     

The impact of agricultural research in Africa: aggregate and case study evidence

This paper presents case-study results and aggregate data to evaluate the impact of research in African agriculture. Of 32 case studies, all but eight report annual returns over 20% and many are far higher, with most gains arising in the late 1980s and 1990s. Spurred by policy reforms and changing incentives, these innovations have led to sustained growth in aggregate cereal crop yields since 1985. Africa's belated ‘green revolution’ is based on new varieties (often with early maturation for drought escape), complemented by new management techniques (typically labor-intensive efforts to conserve soil moisture and build soil fertility).