Technological Backwardness in Agriculture: Is It due to Lack of R&D Expenditures, Human Capital and Openness to International Trade?

In this paper we investigate the relationship between the agricultural technological level and R&D expenditures, human capital and openness to international trade using cross country information for a sample of 104 countries and various sub samples over the period 1961-1991. We first model the unobservable technological level as a dynamic stochastic process in the context of a general translog production function, and then we relate the implied technological levels to the aforementioned variables. For comparison, alternative specifications of the production and its associated technological process are also considered. We find that the proposed model outperforms all of the alternative specifications. The results suggest that the technological gap between developed and less developed countries in agriculture has increased considerably over this period of time and that, overall, the technological levels are directly related to R&D expenditures, human capital and openness, although this relationship is not robust across the different groups of countries considered.