Technical Change In Agriculture Research Articles

Technical change in agriculture and homicides: The case of genetically-modified soy seeds in Brazil

In this paper, we estimate the effects of the introduction of a labor-saving technology in agriculture on violence, by examining the case of the adoption of genetically-modified soy seeds in Brazil. Previous literature has shown that this technological change leads to job displacement, increases in land conflicts and gender inequality. We show that the effects also spread to homicide rates, which increase significantly after the adoption of the modified soy seeds.

Technical change and the Common Agricultural Policy

This paper adopts an alternative method for the analysis of the CAP’s impact on farms’ productivity based on a system of equations derived from a non-nested three-factors CES production function. With this method, we estimate the elasticity of substitution between labour, capital, and land in the EU agricultural sector, the magnitude and direction of technical change, and the impact of the CAP subsidies. The system of equations is estimated using the GMM estimator on a farm-level panel dataset covering 117,179 farms from all EU MS for the period from 2004 to 2015. Our results suggest that land, labour, and capital in EU farms are complementary production factors characterised by a slow decline or stagnation in the land-, labour-, and capital-augmented technical change. Higher levels of Pillar I and Pillar II CAP payments as percentage of total agricultural income have negative or no impact on farms’ technical change, but higher nominal amounts of Pillar I decoupled subsidies, Pillar II investment and LFA subsidies have a positive impact. Moreover, the larger the share of subsidies in total agricultural income the stronger is the negative impact of the CAP on agricultural technical change.

The increasing opportunity cost of sequestering CO2 in the Brazilian Amazon forest

Bush fires raged across the Brazilian Amazon in 2019. The CO2 that was sequestered in those forests is now in the atmosphere, adding to the rate of global warming. The burned-over land will likely be converted to agriculture. Possible contributors to these events include climate change itself, creating hotter, drier conditions, and what is reportedly a reduction in the vigor of forest preservation efforts under a new government. But here we explore a third possible contributor: technical change may have been increasing the incentives to convert forests to agriculture. We examine the nature of technical change from 2003 to 2015, across 287 municipalities within Brazil’s “arc of deforestation.” We consider grains, livestock and timber as agricultural outputs and CO2 emission from deforestation as an undesirable output. On average across the region, we estimate the annual rate of technical change in agriculture over this period to have been 4.9%, with a significant bias toward agricultural outputs and away from CO2 emissions, meaning that it has been increasingly attractive to convert these forests to agriculture. This technological incentive for deforestation has thus been building up during the early part of this century, but actual deforestation was held in check somewhat by forest preservation policies until recently, when a more relaxed policy environment has allowed the increased technological incentive for deforestation to be more fully expressed. These changes have added to climate change as contributors to the recent burst in Amazon forest destruction.

Labor-Saving Agricultural Technical Change and Industrial Development

The introduction of labor-saving technologies in agriculture can release workers who find occupation in the manufacturing sector. The traditional view is that this structural transformation process leads to economic growth. However, if workers leaving agriculture are unskilled, the labor reallocation process reinforces comparative advantage in the least skill-intensive manufacturing industries. We embed this mechanism in a multi-sector endogenous growth model where only skill-intensive manufacturing industries innovate and generate knowledge spillovers. In this setup, the increase in the relative size of the unskilled-labor intensive industries reduces the incentives to innovate and slows down growth. We test the predictions of the model in the context of a large and exogenous increase in agricultural productivity in Brazil. We use social security data to develop a new measure of the labor input in innovation which is representative at any level of spatial aggregation. We find that regions adopting the new agricultural technology experienced a reallocation of unskilled workers away from agriculture into the least R&D-intensive manufacturing industries. The expansion of low-R&D industries attracted workers away from innovative occupations in high-R&D industries, slowing down local aggregate manufacturing productivity growth.

Technical Change and Gender Wage Inequality: Long-Run Effects of India's Green Revolution

New technologies can have distributional consequences that narrow or widen existing inequalities. In this paper, I estimate the effect of India’s Green Revolution on the gender wage gap in village labor markets. Widely considered the country’s most important episode of agricultural technical change, productivity gains from the Green Revolution were due largely to the introduction of high-yielding variety seeds (HYVs). Their sensitivity to water conditions advantaged locations with reliable irrigation access, which I exploit by constructing a novel dataset of historical groundwater resources as a source of exogenous variation in Green Revolution adoption. Using data from 1956-1987 in a difference-in-differences framework, I estimate that groundwater-rich districts experienced large and significant increases in HYV adoption, crop revenues, and cropping intensity. These productivity gains affected labor markets, with male wages rising, but female wages declining, jointly raising the male wage premium an average 17 percent. Additionally, census and microdata results show women substituted away from wage work, and increased their time in unpaid own-farm work and home production. These outcomes are most likely driven by the sharp yield gains achieved with wheat HYVs. As a male labor-biased crop, the expansion of wheat production contributed to declines in female wage labor participation. These findings document how new technology shocks can generate winners and losers, and offers an example of productivity growth that exacerbated gender disparities.

Nature–gender relations within a social-ecological perspective on European multifunctional agriculture: the case of agrobiodiversity

We view agrobiodiversity as a social-ecological phenomenon and, therefore, an example of nature–gender relations within agrarian change, including social, economic, political and technical changes in agriculture and rural areas. As a result of the industrialization of agriculture, nature–gender relations in the field of agrobiodiversity have become characterized by separation processes such as conservation versus use or subsistence versus commodity production. We argue that the sustainable development paradigm, as currently implemented in European Common Agricultural Policy through the concept of multifunctionality, does not necessarily overcome separation tendencies and lead towards integration, despite its claim to bring together different ecological, economic and social needs. In our paper we critically reflect this observation and develop a theory-based analytical framework at the interface of nature and gender relations. For analytical purposes we distinguish between three different agrarian structures (pre-industrialized, industrialized and multifunctional) and focus on the development of two separation tendencies within them and their effects on agrobiodiversity. Concerning nature, we discuss the effects of separating agrobiodiversity conservation and use. With regard to gender, we discuss the separation of subsistence and commodity production. Against this background, we claim for new rural economic rationalities characterized by processes whose qualitative, material and value dimensions maintain agrobiodiversity.

Biased Technical Change in Agriculture and Industrial Growth

AbstractThis paper presents a two‐sector growth model in which industrial accumulation is sensitive to the factor‐saving bias of technical change in agriculture. Agriculture features low factor substitutability and hidden unemployment and, in the baseline scenario, industrial growth is constrained by aggregate demand. Land‐saving innovations are then shown to raise rural employment, enlarge the domestic market for manufactures, and bolster industrial accumulation, in contrast to labor‐saving innovations. The baseline model and its extensions illuminate recent empirical studies which established that higher land yields boost industrial growth in developing countries, as well as accounts of the role of agricultural innovations in the industrialization of Japan, East Asia, and Latin America.

Rapid Economic Growth in India

We explore till 2040 the role of technical change in agriculture, irrigation and concern for food security in rapid economic growth in India. India aspires to achieve double-digit growth. For a densely populated country of 1.2 billion people with growing incomes meeting its increasing and diversifying food needs will be a challenge. We explore this using a multi-sector, inter-temporal optimising model with 20 expenditure classes, 10 rural and 10 urban, each with its own linear expenditure system derived from an underlying non-linear demand system. We also assess the diversification of demand that is likely to occur and impact on poverty under different alternatives. At least a 4 per cent growth rate of agricultural gross domestic product (GDP) is needed to support GDP growth rates in excess of 8 per cent for which a slightly optimistic agriculture TFPG growth rate of 2 per cent along with a slightly optimistic development of irrigation potential to 90 million hectare (Mha) (net) is needed. JEL Classification: C61, C67, O13, O21, O33

“And this Reason has a Justification”: Medieval Scientific Argument for the Custom against Eating Legumes on Passover

This article discusses a botanical-agricultural reason for the prohibition against eating legumes on Passover, one presented by Rabbeinu Manoah (Provence, thirteenth century). According to Rabbeinu Manoah, the basis of the prohibition is an ancient agricultural concept whereby through changes in climate and annual rainfall, wheat kernels become legumes. It seems that technical changes in agriculture in the Middle Ages affected the ban. The practice of using a three-field rotation of grains and legumes in European fields increased the mixture of aftergrowths of legumes from the previous years in the grain harvest of the present year. This phenomenon strengthened the ancient concept among contemporary agriculturists that grains had changed into legumes, when, in fact, the legumes were merely aftergrowths.

Agricultural Technical Change and Economic Diversity of Farm Households: The Case of Vietnam

This paper investigates the impacts of agricultural technical change on economic diversity of farm households in Vietnam. To develop the empirical analysis, a model is presented in which the estimated impact of agricultural technical changes on economic diversification allows for non-neutral technical change. The paper tests the theoretical predictions of this model by providing empirical evidence of the impact of land consolidation on farm and nonfarm outcomes such as labour supply, profits, labour intensity and productivity. By using different methods aimed at verifying and checking the consistency of the results, we find that land consolidation may reduce on farm labour supply, labour intensity and improve farm profits and productivity. Similarly, it may release more farm labour to nonfarm sectors and increase nonfarm profits. The empirical results show that factor-biased technical change plays an important role in explaining the impact of agricultural technical change on economic diversification in Vietnam.

Agricultural Trade Liberalization, Productivity Gain, and Poverty Alleviation: A General Equilibrium Analysis

Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models have gained continuously in popularity as an empirical tool for assessing the impact of trade liberalization on agricultural growth, poverty, and income distribution. However, conventional models ignore the channels linking technical change in agriculture, trade openness, and poverty. This study seeks to incorporate econometric evidence of these linkages into a CGE model to estimate the impact of alternative trade liberalization scenarios on poverty and equity.The analysis uses the Latent Class Stochastic Frontier Model (LCSFM) and the metafrontier function to investigate the influence of trade openness on agricultural technological change. The estimated productivity effects induced from higher levels of trade are combined with a general equilibrium analysis of trade liberalization to evaluate the income and price changes. These effects are then used to infer the impact on poverty and inequality following the top-down approach. The model is applied to Tunisian data using the social accounting matrix of 2001 and the 2000 household expenditures surveys. Poverty is found to decline under agricultural and full trade liberalization and this decline is much more pronounced when the productivity effects are included.

Agricultura empresarial e produção camponesa no contexto das disputas territoriais recentes: o caso paranaense

This text presents a reflection about the technical changes in agriculture which took place in Brazil, with the state of Paraná as the research sample. To that end, statistics related to the reach and extent of crop yield, as well as the workforce involved in the activities and the dynamics of land property structures are considered. The aim is to clarify territorial outlines that the factors above produce, together with the roles that the State, cooperatives and companies perform in this process. A combined analysis of such variables indicates a process that, although not new, has been redefined due to technical base modernization. It consists of a territorial dispute between business and peasant agriculture, and its developments are not limited to the countryside, since the mobilization of people, income and public funds are involved therein.

Abordagem Alternativa do Crescimento Agrícola: um modelo de dinâmica evolucionária

O artigo visa analisar a economia agrícola sob o enfoque da teoria evolucionária. O referencial teórico a ser objeto de estudo, contrário às concepções ortodoxas, baseia-se nos pressupostos de incertezas do ambiente, racionalidade limitada dos agentes, no desequilíbrio dinâmico e na instabilidade estrutural. No intuito de comparar a evolução tecnológica na agricultura com os padrões regionais dos sistemas agroindustriais brasileiros, procurou-se, de um lado, realizar, por meio de indicadores de localização e especialização, uma análise de concentração regional e, por outro, construir um Modelo Evolucionário de Crescimento Agrícola, aqui denominado MECA, que permite simular o provável comportamento da agricultura produtora de grãos. Dentro dessa orientação, foi possível identificar a região dinâmica agroindustrial bem como padrões de comportamento das mudanças técnicas na agricultura. Em um ambiente de competição tecnológica, o modelo mostra que a competição pelos recursos produtivos nos complexos agroindustriais produtores de grãos leva à busca permanente de inovações, caracterizando uma dinâmica evolucionária entre as atividades e uma maior concentração do capital setorial e regional.

Water quality assessment of the Mogi-Guaçu River in Brazil: proposal of a system-based model

The Water Code, created in 1934, was the first attempt of governmental intervention in Water Basin Management in Brazil. It was a centralized bureaucratic system established to regulate the use of water. Since the beginning, Water Management suffered significant changes and the model currently used is an integrated participative systemic model. The distribution of water resources in Brazil is very irregular, 70% of water is located in the North region, 15% to the Central-West, 12% in the South and Southeast and 3% in the Northeast region (BNDES 1997). The state of Sao Paulo is located in the Southeast region, which has the biggest water consumption. The Water Resources Agency of Sao Paulo State (CETESB) has an advanced water management system with 20 Watershed Management Committees. Groups from different social sectors compose these committees. They constitute a new kind of organization that is responsible for the watershed planning. Actually, these committees use to obtain relevant information but they are not able to develop future scenarios, objectives, strategies and temporary goals for the water basin. The Mogi-Guacu watershed is the most important basin in Sao Paulo State from the economic point of view, but the river has problems of erosion, silting, flooding and low water quality. The water quality problems are due to nonpoint sources of pollution from agriculture and municipal and industrial point sources. In order to support the committees to improve Basin Planning this study propose to apply a system dynamic model to understand watershed dynamics to evaluate the human impact to water quality through the use of scenarios. It considers that Brazilian water quality database is in a initial stage of developing and also that only a few rivers have been studied for modeling purposes. Therefore, the use of highly complex data demanding models is not practicable. The systemic model under construction intends to provide an adequate model for a simulation considering limitations of Brazilian database and also includes new variables (turbidity and organic matter in the sediment) that are considered critical to simulate a turbid river with highly sedimentary organic matter content. The longitudinal observed data is presented here and it shows an evident relation between the urban sites and the water quality degradation and self-depuration. Hopefully it will allow the evaluation of impact under different scenarios of economic and population growth, technical changes in agriculture and environmental and social policies for watershed management.

Empirical Evaluation of Performance and Effect of Currency Devaluation with Special Reference to Export and Import under Policy Reforms on Sri Lanka's Agriculture

In this paper an empirical evaluation of the performance of Sri Lanka's agricultural sector under policy reforms with respect to the exchange rate implications is made. By the policy reforms, the exchange rate reforms made considerable impact on the agriculture exports, input and food imports and economic development. In our general equilibrium growth accounting approach, the real contributions of agricultural exports, food imports and fertilizer price reveal that without the exchange rate reform the contributions would have been really detrimental to the agricultural production as well as to the economy of Sri Lanka. In this way, Sri Lanka's policy reform had a positive effect on the economy through the exchange rate reform, although it had negative impact on the domestic food production sector and related small farmers. Further analysis on the contributions of technical changes in agriculture and non-agriculture supports the push-pull effect concept in both sectors in this paper.

Green revolutions and miracle economies: Agricultural innovations, trade and growth

The purpose of this paper is to develop a simple model of an economy in which growth is driven by a combination of exogenous technical change in agriculture and a rising world demand for labor-intensive manufactured exports. We explore the relative roles of an exogenous agricultural productivity shock and rising export demand in a model with two traded industrial goods and a non-traded agricultural good, food. When the non-traded sector uses a specific factor, we show that technical change in agriculture may be the key to factor migration into industry, in particular driving intersectoral labor migration. A key assumption is a less than unitary price elasticity of demand for food. Our results could form a crucial link in capturing the story of labor-abundant economies which experienced structural transformation and growth through labor-intensive manufactured exports, without prior technology breakthroughs in industry. They contribute to explaining the massive growth in factor accumulation which shows up in some growth accounting studies: they may also imply that some of the contribution of ‘technical progress’ is mistakenly attributed solely to factor accumulation.

Agricultural Productivity and Economic Growth: Role of Tax Revenues and Infrastructures

1. IntroductionDevelopment economists such as Rostow (1960) and Ranis and Fei (1961) have stressed a positive linkage between agricultural productivity and industrialization. The positive link, however, has been argued to be nonexistent by Matsuyama (1992) in a two-sector endogenous growth model of small-open economies with a low elasticity of agricultural goods and the existence of learning-by-doing only in the domestic manufacturing sector.1 As a result of comparative advantage, higher agricultural productivity solicits labor inputs from the manufacturing sector in his model, leading to lower learning-by-doing and economic growth.Matsuyama's results, however, may not be consistent with what has actually happened in Japan and other East Asian economies. In Japan a land reform has been implemented, and allocation of resources to agricultural research has been increased since the Meiji Restoration. As a result of agricultural technical progress,2 agricultural productivity in Japan is much higher than before the Meiji Restoration. In particular, evidence has shown that the agricultural technical change after the Meiji Restoration tends to increase nonagricultural output by pushing resources out of the agricultural sector into the nonagricultural sector. For example, see Yamaguchi and Binswanger (1975, table 7) for the quantitative effects of the agricultural technical change in Japan on nonagricultural output (column 3) and on input reallocation (columns 5 and 7) in 1880-1965. Similarly, the agricultural technical change was higher in Korea's and Taiwan's early stages of economic development, as they have founded agricultural research institutes and farmers' associations during the Japanese colonial period3 and implemented land reforms after World War II. For evidence, see Mason et al. (1980, chapter 7) for the case of Korea and Thorbecke (1979) for the case of Taiwan. A World Bank (1982, p. 45) study reports that for the 23 developing countries whose agricultural growth rate in the 1970s exceeded 3% a year, 17 countries had a GDP growth rate above 5% a year in the same period. Finally, using cross-country data for 14 Asian developing countries in 1960-1986, Mellor (1995) finds a positive and significant relationship between growth rate of per capita agricultural and nonagricultural GDPs, in which both agricultural and nonagricultural sectors grow more rapidly than 31 sub-Saharan and 20 Latin American countries. These above observations lead to interesting questions as to what mechanism lies in the positive impact of accelerated agricultural growth on nonagricultural growth. What policies might increase the efficiency with which a productive agricultural sector moves a nonagricultural sector forward?The purpose of this study is to revisit the linkages between agricultural productivity and economic growth with a government policy. Our model is based on Matsuyama's (1992) framework, with a small twist, so that we can clearly identify the mechanism leading to a positive relationship. The departure in this article lies in introducing a government, which collects taxes and then conducts expenditures on infrastructures. An important role played by higher agricultural productivity in an early stage of economic development is the one by which it renders the government larger tax revenues, so that larger expenditure on infrastructures is facilitated.4 In a study investigating Taiwan's rice-for-fertilizer bartering system in the 1950s and 1960s, Koo (1996, table 2) finds that the resulting hidden taxes on rice alone account for 10-20% of total tax revenue in the period extending from 1950 to 1969. Along with other taxes, the agricultural sector is thus an important source of government revenue in a developing economy.5 Following Barro (1991), public expenditure on infrastructures is assumed to be productive, in that the learning-by-doing effect of the manufacturing sector becomes enhanced with public expenditure on infrastructures. …

Agricultural Productivity Growth, Rural Economic Diversity, and Economic Reforms: India, 1970–2000

A salient theme in D. Gale Johnson’s work is the importance of agricultural development for general prosperity and for economic diversification (e.g., Johnson 2000). Johnson has also noted that most of the world’s poor are engaged in farming, so that a key focus of development policy is to raise the incomes of farmers. From a global perspective, increasing the productivity of agriculture, given the fixity of land, is necessary for both poverty reduction and the development of the nonagricultural sector. At the level of the world, agricultural productivity gains, poverty reduction, and the growth of the nonfarm sector are complements. However, the question remains whether these observations imply that every poor country should focus its public resources on agricultural development in order to raise the incomes of people now engaged in farming and whether such a policy is necessary for obtaining economic diversity. In this article, we use the experience of India over the past 30 years to address the issue of whether agricultural technical change actually leads to economic diversification and income growth within the rural sector in the context of an open-economy country in which there are cross-area trade and capital flows. We focus in particular on the rural sector because this is the sector in which linkages between agricultural and nonagricultural sectors are thought to be the strongest. We exploit the fact that India has maintained a policy of openness with respect to agricultural technology over this period, permitting and actively supporting agricultural development, and has moved to a reformed regime in which goods are traded and capital is more mobile in the 1990s. Evidence on the relationship between agricultural growth and nonfarm

Endogenous International Technology Spillovers and Biased Technical Change in Agriculture

This paper analyzes trade-related knowledge flows from an innovating country to other countries. It is assumed that knowledge is embodied in commodities traded between countries and that the potential productivity of this knowledge is determined by the local usability of foreign technologies. The usability of foreign knowledge is dependent on the local absorption capacity (such as knowledge infrastructure and human capital) and on structural differences (factor endowments or climate) between countries. In agriculture, a large portion of the knowledge is embodied in inputs which cause factor-biased technical change in the receiving sectors. Trade-related knowledge transmission is introduced in an applied multi-region general equilibrium model (GTAP) to study the macro-economic and sectoral impacts of knowledge spillovers and of trade policies. Endogenous embodied technology spillovers bear some important implications for trade policy, because protective measures preclude countries not only from cheaper imports but also from foreign technologies.

Environment, Technology, and the Social Articulation of Risk in West African Agriculture

two preoccupations are not mutually exclusive. Superficially, they share the common concern that liberalization is insufficient to resolve the subSaharan food crisis. At a deeper level, the two preoccupations are more intimately interrelated via the correspondence that links initial wealth to risk exposure and to behavior in both production and asset accumulation. A number of recent empirical studies of risk in low-income countries find that households are able to employ their accumulated assets to smooth consumption in the face of adverse agricultural production shocks. 3 Missing from these studies is explicit attention to the fact that the effective risk from which households insulate consumption is not that of production shocks directly, but of those shocks as socially articulated by institutions and property rights. This article explores the creation and distribution of effective risk, estimating how environment, technology, and social factors interact to construct it endogenously. 4 Put differently, this article develops the notion that the risk from which households ex post try to insulate consumption is not an immutable natural or technical feature of the landscape. As Michael Watt’s contrast between precolonial and colonial Nigeria forcefully demonstrates, the effective risk presented by an unchanged set of environmental and technical circumstances can