IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ess/wpaper/id12723.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Revisiting Rates of Return to Agricultural R&D Investment

Author

Listed:
  • Alejandro Nin Pratt
  • Eduardo Magalhaes

Abstract

This study proposes the use of partial least squares to determine the key parameters of the perpetual inventory method model of capital stock as a new approach to calculate research and development (R&D) knowledge stocks and R&D elasticities. This approach avoids most of the major problems encountered in the literature that lead to obtaining very high and implausible rates of return to agricultural R&D...Using this approach, we obtain an average R&D elasticity for low- and middle-income (LM) countries of 0.23 and an average rate of return to R&D investment of 6.0 percent, bigger than the average discount rate of 4.2 percent for these countries. Results show that 60 percent of LM countries in our sample are underinvesting in agricultural R&D, as they can get higher returns by investing in this activity than in activities that return the social discount rate. [IFPRI Discussion Paper 01718]

Suggested Citation

  • Alejandro Nin Pratt & Eduardo Magalhaes, 2018. "Revisiting Rates of Return to Agricultural R&D Investment," Working Papers id:12723, eSocialSciences.
    • Handle: RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:12723
    Note: Institutional Papers
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.esocialsciences.org/Download/repecDownload.aspx?fname=A2018413121933_20.pdf&fcategory=Articles&AId=12723&fref=repec
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Susanto Basu & David N. Weil, 1998. "Appropriate Technology and Growth," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 113(4), pages 1025-1054.
    2. Moore Mark A. & Vining Aidan R. & Boardman Anthony E., 2013. "More appropriate discounting: the rate of social time preference and the value of the social discount rate," Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, De Gruyter, vol. 4(1), pages 1-16, March.
    3. Hall, Bronwyn H. & Mairesse, Jacques & Mohnen, Pierre, 2010. "Measuring the Returns to R&D," Handbook of the Economics of Innovation, in: Bronwyn H. Hall & Nathan Rosenberg (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Innovation, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1033-1082, Elsevier.
    4. Daniel K. N. Johnson & Robert E. Evenson, 1999. "R&D Spillovers To Agriculture: Measurement And Application," Contemporary Economic Policy, Western Economic Association International, vol. 17(4), pages 432-456, October.
    5. William Wilson & Bruce Dahl, 2010. "Competition and Dynamics in Market Structure in Corn and Soybean Seed," Antitrust Chronicle, Competition Policy International, vol. 4.
    6. L. Gutierrez & M. M. Gutierrez, 2003. "International R&D spillovers and productivity growth in the agricultural sector. A panel cointegration approach," European Review of Agricultural Economics, Oxford University Press and the European Agricultural and Applied Economics Publications Foundation, vol. 30(3), pages 281-303, September.
    7. Wilson, William W. & Dahl, Bruce L., 2010. "Dynamic Changes in Market Structure and Competition in the Corn and Soybean Seed Sector," Agribusiness & Applied Economics Report 58487, North Dakota State University, Department of Agribusiness and Applied Economics.
    8. Markus Eberhardt & Francis Teal, 2013. "No Mangoes in the Tundra: Spatial Heterogeneity in Agricultural Productivity Analysis," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 75(6), pages 914-939, December.
    9. Daniel K.N. Johnson & Robert E. Evenson, 2000. "How Far Away Is Africa? Technological Spillovers to Agriculture and Productivity," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 82(3), pages 743-749.
    10. Terrance M. Hurley & Xudong Rao & Philip G. Pardey, 2014. "Re-examining the Reported Rates of Return to Food and Agricultural Research and Development," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 96(5), pages 1492-1504.
    11. William H. Greene & Lynda Khalaf & Robin Sickles & Michael Veall & Marcel-Cristian Voia (ed.), 2016. "Productivity and Efficiency Analysis," Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics, Springer, edition 1, number 978-3-319-23228-7, March.
    12. Carl E. Pray & Keith O. Fuglie, 2015. "Agricultural Research by the Private Sector," Annual Review of Resource Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 7(1), pages 399-424, October.
    13. Andersen, Matthew A., 2015. "Public investment in U.S. agricultural R&D and the economic benefits," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 38-43.
    14. Renkow, Mitch & Byerlee, Derek, 2010. "The impacts of CGIAR research: A review of recent evidence," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 35(5), pages 391-402, October.
    15. Roberto Esposti & Pierpaolo Pierani, 2003. "Building the Knowledge Stock: Lags, Depreciation, and Uncertainty in R&D Investment and Link with Productivity Growth," Journal of Productivity Analysis, Springer, vol. 19(1), pages 33-58, January.
    16. Alston, Julian M. & Pardey, Philip G., 2001. "Attribution and other problems in assessing the returns to agricultural R&D," Agricultural Economics, Blackwell, vol. 25(2-3), pages 141-152, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Jonathan Brooks, 2023. "Agricultural policies and food systems: Priorities for indicator development," Journal of Agricultural Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 74(1), pages 3-23, February.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. repec:oup:apecpp:v:40:y:2018:i:3:p:421-444. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Mason-D'Croz, Daniel & Sulser, Timothy B. & Wiebe, Keith & Rosegrant, Mark W. & Lowder, Sarah K. & Nin-Pratt, Alejandro & Willenbockel, Dirk & Robinson, Sherman & Zhu, Tingju & Cenacchi, Nicola & Duns, 2019. "Agricultural investments and hunger in Africa modeling potential contributions to SDG2 – Zero Hunger," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 116(C), pages 38-53.
    3. Adetutu, Morakinyo O. & Ajayi, Victor, 2020. "The impact of domestic and foreign R&D on agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 125(C).
    4. Derek Headey & Mohammad Alauddin & D.S. Prasada Rao, 2010. "Explaining agricultural productivity growth: an international perspective," Agricultural Economics, International Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 41(1), pages 1-14, January.
    5. Galushko, Viktoriya & Gray, Richard & Smyth, Stuart & Arnison, Paul, 2010. "Resolving FTO Barriers in GM Canola," 14th ICABR Conference, June 16-18, 2010, Ravello, Italy 188092, International Consortium on Applied Bioeconomy Research (ICABR).
    6. Wang, Shanchao & Alston, Julian M. & Pardey, Philip G., 2023. "R&D Lags in Economic Models," Staff Papers 330085, University of Minnesota, Department of Applied Economics.
    7. Lachaud, Michée A. & Bravo-Ureta, Boris E., 2022. "A Bayesian statistical analysis of return to agricultural R&D investment in Latin America: Implications for food security," Technology in Society, Elsevier, vol. 70(C).
    8. Hertel, By Thomas W. & Baldos, Uris L.C. & Fuglie, Keith O., 2020. "Trade in technology: A potential solution to the food security challenges of the 21st century," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 127(C).
    9. Stéphane Lemarié & Valérie Orozco & Jean-Pierre Butault & Antonio Musolesi & Michel Simioni & Bertrand Schmitt, 2020. "Assessing the long-term impact of agricultural research on productivity: evidence from France," European Review of Agricultural Economics, Oxford University Press and the European Agricultural and Applied Economics Publications Foundation, vol. 47(4), pages 1559-1586.
    10. Coronese, Matteo & Occelli, Martina & Lamperti, Francesco & Roventini, Andrea, 2023. "AgriLOVE: Agriculture, land-use and technical change in an evolutionary, agent-based model," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 208(C).
    11. de Rassenfosse, Gaétan & Jaffe, Adam B., 2018. "Econometric evidence on the depreciation of innovations," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 101(C), pages 625-642.
    12. Pedro Andres Garzon Delvaux & Heinrich Hockmann & Peter Voigt & Pavel Ciaian & Sergio Gomez y Paloma, 2018. "The impact of private R&D on the performance of food-processing firms: Evidence from Europe, Japan and North America," JRC Research Reports JRC104144, Joint Research Centre.
    13. Binlei Gong, 2020. "New Growth Accounting," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 102(2), pages 641-661, March.
    14. Gioldasis, Georgios & Musolesi, Antonio & Simioni, Michel, 2023. "Interactive R&D spillovers: An estimation strategy based on forecasting-driven model selection," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 144-169.
    15. Steven P Dehmer & Philip G Pardey & Jason M Beddow & Yuan Chai, 2019. "Reshuffling the global R&D deck, 1980-2050," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(3), pages 1-12, March.
    16. Ryota Nakatani, 2024. "Food companies' productivity dynamics: Exploring the role of intangible assets," Agribusiness, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 40(1), pages 185-226, January.
    17. Andersen, Matthew A., 2019. "Knowledge productivity and the returns to agricultural research: a review," Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, vol. 63(2), April.
    18. Randolph Luca Bruno & Elodie Douarin & Julia Korosteleva & Slavo Radosevic, 2019. "Determinants of Productivity Gap in the European Union: A Multilevel Perspective," LEM Papers Series 2019/25, Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy.
    19. Edwin Goni & William F. Maloney, 2014. "Why don’t Poor Countries do R&D?," Documentos CEDE 11947, Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE.
    20. Nin-Pratt, Alejandro & Falconi, César A., 2018. "The agricultural R&D investment gap in Latin America and the Caribbean," IFPRI discussion papers 1749, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
    21. Nin-Pratt, Alejandro, 2016. "Comparing apples to apples: A new indicator of research and development investment intensity in agriculture:," IFPRI discussion papers 1559, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

    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:ess:wpaper:id:12723. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Padma Prakash (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.esocialsciences.org .

    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.