Between data and decisions: the organization of agricultural economic information systems

Abstract

In the current political economic environment there is pressure to reduce and reorient public agency involvement in agricultural economic research and information services. Efforts to evaluate the effectiveness of public investments and enhance sectoral coherence through exploitation of institutional complementarity are constrained by weak understanding of how economic information is produced, processed and circulated. In this paper, we locate the centers of analytic competence and analyze supply of agricultural economic advisory services through development of an information accounting framework. We focus on the relative contributions of public agencies, commercial firms, collective organizations, and informal networks in order to identify organizational structures and institutional arrangements of coordination in the agricultural economy. The observed division of labor in information systems reflects the heterogeneous distribution and strategic choices of actors with respect to internal analytic competencies. Decision makers in agricultural businesses are heavily dependent on the services of a diverse range of intermediaries who perform information translation and customization functions. These intermediaries rely heavily on largely, but not exclusively, publicly supplied data and information inputs. This strongly linear aspect of agricultural economic information systems is identified as a component subsystem within the larger and more highly interconnected system of innovation. The dominant role of public agencies in economic information systems suggests that they currently perform highly valuable coordinating functions in agriculture. While commercial and collective organizations make important contributions and could be mobilized to assume broader responsibility, there are likely to be limitations to substitutability based on the classic (but still fully relevant) problem of private underinvestment in information.