Land Infrastructure Improvement in Agricultural Development: The Japanese Case, 1900-1965

Abstract

Land infrastructure improvement, such as irrigation and drainage, represents a basic condition for the development and diffusion of seed-fertilizer technology which facilitates the substitution of fertilizer and other current inputs for land, thereby breaking the constraint of scarce land resources on agricultural production. Land infrastructure improvement has been identified as one of the most important factors to the growth of agricultural productivity in Japan. However, less attention has been given to a systematic analysis of the costs and benefits of land infrastructure improvement and to the adjustments which it imposed on agriculture. In this paper I attempt to examine, through the estimation of aggregate production function, the productivity of land infrastructure improvement in Japanese agricultural development in terms of the marginal social and private rates of return. I also try to demonstrate the contribution of land infrastructure improvement to agricultural growth in the 1900-1965 period. The recent technological breakthrough in the production of major staple cereals, widely heralded as the green revolution, has made the irrigation infrastructure a bottleneck more critical than ever for agricultural development in developing countries.1 Stimulus for this study was in part due to the fact that land infrastructure problems are becoming