Macroeconomics and Undergraduate Agricultural Economics

Abstract

This paper focuses on macroeconomics in undergraduate agricultural economics curricula. We briefly review some of what leaders in the agricultural economics and economics professions, macroeconomics teachers, and textbook authors say about what is important, what should be taught and learned in modern undergraduate macroeconomics courses. We also report on a survey of faculty of agricultural economics departments who have responsibility for undergraduate instruction in 50 U.S. agricultural economics undergraduate programs. The surveys provide information on the current status of economics courses in their programs and the relative importance of different macroeconomic subjects to students in undergraduate agricultural economics. W hile most of the research and teaching in agricultural economics has historically been more closely associated with microeconomics than macroeconomics, there has been a significant increase in the interest in the latter branch of economics in agricultural economics textbooks and journals in the past two decades. Professor G. Edward Schuh's address to the 1976 meeting of the American Agricultural Economics Association (AAEA) may be regarded as a seminal event in the Association's move toward giving more attention to macroeconomics. He closed his talk with these words: It is now almost an imperative that we give strong macroeconomic training to students, that we challenge them to know more about world agriculture and world economic development, and that we develop a research capability that will enable us to provide useful analytical and empirical inputs into the policy-making process and to effectively discharge larger educational responsibilities to U.S. citizens. Our challenge will be to do this without weakening the microeconomic work that is so much a part of tradition and that can serve so well in developing the macroeconomic theory and in doing the