Economic Evaluation of Agricultural Research

Abstract

Many evaluations of the economic impacts of investment in agricultural research have been carried out over the past three decades. This article reviews certain aspects of this literature. Instead of focusing on details of the evaluation approaches or findings of individual studies, the extent of the coverage of agricultural research is assessed. It is found that the work in this area is limited in several ways: Agricultural research evaluations have been mostly ex post in nature, evaluations have focused on production oriented research, and a single measure of worth related to economic efficiency is the end product of most evaluations. Implications for the use of research evaluations in research decision making are discussed in a concluding section.