IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ags/aare16/235231.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Rise and Fall of U.S. Farm Productivity Growth, 1910-2007

Author

Listed:
  • Alston, Julian M.
  • Andersen, Matthew A.
  • Pardey, Philip G.

Abstract

Some studies have reported a slowdown in U.S. farm productivity growth, but the prevalent view among economists is to reject or downplay the slowdown hypothesis, implying that the rates of productivity growth experienced over the past half century can be projected forward. We set out to resolve this issue, which matters both for understanding the past and anticipating the future. Using newly compiled multifactor and partial-factor productivity estimates, developed for the purpose, we examine changes in the pattern of U.S. agricultural productivity growth over the past century. We detect sizable and significant slowdowns in the rate of productivity growth. Across the 48 contiguous states for which we have very detailed data for 1949–2007, U.S. multifactor productivity (MFP) growth averaged just 1.18 percent per year during 1990–2007 compared with 2.02 percent per year for the period 1949–1990. MFP in 44 of the 48 states has been growing at a statistically slower rate since 1990. Using a longer-run national series, since 1990 productivity growth has slowed compared with its longer-run growth rate, which averaged 1.52 percent per year for the entire period, 1910–2007. More subtly, the historically rapid rates of MFP growth during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s can be seen as an aberration relative to the long-run trend. A cubic time-trend model fits the data very well, with an inflection around 1962. We speculate that a wave of technological progress through the middle of the twentieth century—reflecting the progressive adoption of various mechanical innovations, improved crop varieties, synthetic fertilizers and other chemicals, each in a decades long process—contributed to a sustained surge of faster-than-normal productivity growth throughout the third quarter of the century. A particular feature of this process was to move people off farms, a one-time transformation of agriculture that was largely completed by 1980.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Alston, Julian M. & Andersen, Matthew A. & Pardey, Philip G., 2016. "The Rise and Fall of U.S. Farm Productivity Growth, 1910-2007," 2016 Conference (60th), February 2-5, 2016, Canberra, Australia 235231, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society.
  • Handle: RePEc:ags:aare16:235231
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.235231
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/235231/files/The%20rise%20and%20fall%20upload.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.22004/ag.econ.235231?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Yu Sheng & V. Eldon Ball & Kenneth Erickson & Carlos San Juan Mesonada, 2022. "Cross-country agricultural TFP convergence and capital deepening: evidence for induced innovation from 17 OECD countries," Journal of Productivity Analysis, Springer, vol. 58(2), pages 185-202, December.
    2. Jayson L. Lusk & Jesse Tack & Nathan P. Hendricks, 2018. "Heterogeneous Yield Impacts from Adoption of Genetically Engineered Corn and the Importance of Controlling for Weather," NBER Chapters, in: Agricultural Productivity and Producer Behavior, pages 11-39, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Farm Management; Production Economics;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:aare16:235231. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aaresea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.