Menu Of Technologies Research Articles

Assessing environmental impact of genetically modified seeds in Brazilian agriculture.

Genetically modified (GM) seeds have had relevant impacts on worldwide agriculture, even with a limited number of essential traits launched in the markets. The focus on platforms crops has favored the combination of traditional breeding, GM insertion, and diffusion in agriculture. One of the remarkable features of the GM traits has been the close link with pest and weed control systems. We investigate the environmental effects due to pesticides for two different GM seeds: insect resistant (IR) cotton and herbicide tolerant (HT) soybeans in a particular period of Brazilian agriculture, 2009–2013. We use a dataset on commercial farms' use of pesticides and biotechnology in Brazil to document environmental effects of GM traits. We explore within farm variation for farmers planting conventional and GM seeds to identify the effect of adoption on the environmental impact of pesticides measured as the quantity of active ingredients of chemicals and the Environmental Impact Quotient (EIQ) index. The findings show that the IR trait reduces application of insecticides by 22% and the associated environmental impact by 20% the environmental impact of insecticides. However, for HT traits, we find that application of herbicides increases by 55.8% and the associated environmental impact by 44.4%, showing a significant increase in the EIQ. The HT results are driven by an increase of less toxic herbicides elevenfold larger than the decrease in less toxic ones, which we interpret as evidence of weak substitutability between herbicides of different toxicity levels. Addressing what happened in the last decade, the paper also presents a view of the transformations in GM usage in Brazil, focusing on the considerable success in adopting stacked genes. Future perspectives point to a more diversified menu of technologies, crops, and adopting countries, going beyond platform crops and more prominent agriculture exporters.

Factor-specific technology choice

This paper analyzes the properties of a two-dimensional problem of factor-specific technology choice subject to a technology menu — understood as the choice of the degree of factor augmentation by a producing firm or the choice of quality of goods demanded by a consumer. The considered general setup encompasses the benchmark cases of Cobb–Douglas, CES and Leontief (minimum) functions. It is shown that the technology menu and the global function (envelope of local functions) are dual objects, in a well-defined generalized sense of duality. In the optimum, partial elasticities of (i) the local function, (ii) the technology menu and (iii) the global function are all equal and there exists a clear-cut, economically interpretable relationship between their curvatures. In particular, the elasticity of substitution of the global function is always above that of the local function. The paper also invokes Bergson’s theorem to comment on the consequences of assuming homogeneity or homotheticity, with a particular focus on technology menus constructed as level curves of idea (unit factor productivity) distributions.

GMOs: A Good but Battered Means for Sustainable Production Intensification

FAO promotes Sustainable Production Intensification (SPI), which consists of a technology menu for optimizing crop production per unit area, taking into consideration the range of sustainability aspects including potential and/or real social, political, economic and environmental impacts. The author suggests that Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) cropping is not only well aligned to SPI but also that this technology is a way to maximize the SPI principles. GMO crops cover about 13 percent of the world’s cropped land. More than three quarters of this area is within the three countries that also lead the production and export of the major food and feed commodities: USA, Brazil and Argentina. The remaining area is spread across about 29 countries, mostly developing countries and a few industrialised countries. Four crops account for the majority of land under GMO crops: corn, soybean, cotton, and canola. About 90 percent of the soybean and 80 percent of the corn that is traded in the world market is genetically engineered. Consequently a very large part of the world population likely eats every day food that either contains GMOs or GMO derivatives or animal products derived from GMO fed animals. It has been the fastest adopted agricultural technology, rising to its current level over only twenty years. Further increases in production will mainly occur in developing and low-income countries. In the EU, a large majority of the member states have chosen to rule against GMO cultivation. It is essentially a ‘marketing’ strategy. Nevertheless, GMOs land on European tables daily in one way or another. The developing world and its low income countries are gradually improving their policy, institutional and administrative environments towards the adoption of modern biotech rules. The technology is simple, has been thoroughly tested and through extensive scientific research and testing has been shown to be as safe as crops bred and developed by other techniques. The advantages in terms of higher crop productivity and lower production costs are substantial and widely proven. GMOs are also substantially eco-friendly but more research and development is required to improve herbicide management. Only a small fraction of the GM achievements, and opportunities, are being widely exploited. Other tested discoveries, which offer valuable strategies to address the challenges of climate change, productivity concerns and human health plagues/malnutrition that are widespread in low income countries, are yet to be adopted on a meaningful scale. There is no credible evidence that GMOs constitute a threat to human health. International rules and regulatory frameworks exist and are acknowledged. Cultural, which at times appear to be ideological, barriers more often of the developed world, are hindering rational technological advancement and food security and adequacy. In order to feed the growing world population, heading towards 9 billion or more by 2050, there is the need to increase food production by 60-70 percent, and to double it in the developing world where the highest demographic growth will occur. A safe and sustainable technology exists that can contribute substantially towards this target and humanitarian responsibility.

A microfoundation for normalized CES production functions with factor-augmenting technical change

Based on a tractable “endogeneous technology choice” framework, we provide a microfoundation for aggregate normalized constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production functions with non-neutral, factor-augmenting technical change. In this framework, firms are allowed to choose unit productivities of capital and labor optimally from a technology menu constructed under the assumption that unit factor productivities (UFPs) are independently Weibull-distributed. The Weibull distribution itself is also microfounded here: based on extreme value theory, it is found to be an accurate and robust approximation of the true UFP distribution if technologies consist of a large number of complementary components.

Physicist Steven Koonin takes on a new role as DOE’s ‘technical conscience’

Physicist Steven Koonin takes on a new role as DOE’s ‘technical conscience’

An 800-MHz embedded DRAM with a concurrent refresh mode

An 800-MHz embedded DRAM macro employs a memory cell utilizing a device from the 90-nm high-performance technology menu; a 2.2-nm gate oxide 1.5 V IO device. A concurrent refresh mode is designed to improve the memory utilization to over 99% for a 64 /spl mu/s data retention time. A concurrent refresh scheduler utilizes up-count and down-count registers to identify at least one array to be refreshed at every clock cycle, emulating a classical distributed refresh mode. A command multiplier employs low frequency phased clock signals to generate the clock, commands, and addresses at rates up to 4/spl times/ that of the tester frequency. The macro integrates masked redundancy allocation logic during at speed multibank test. The hardware results show a 312-MHz random access frequency and 800-MHz multibank frequency at 1.2 V, respectively.

Knowledge of Technology in Poor Countries

The paper focues on three variables that affect knowledge of technology. We found a negative cross‐country correlation between the efficiency of unskilled labor and the efficiencies of skilled labor and capital. We interpret this finding as evidence of the existence of a world technology frontier. On this frontier, increases in the efficiency of unskilled labor are obtained at the cost declines in efficiency of skilled labor and capital. We estimated a model in which firms in each choice optionally choose from a menu of technologies, i.e., their choice of technology depends on the county’s endowment of skilled and unskilled labour, so that the model is one of appropriate technology. The estimation allowed for country‐specific technology frontiers, due to barriers to technology adoption. We found that poor countries tend disproportionately to be inside the world technology frontier.

The U.S. Technology Frontier

In Caselli and Coleman (2000) we developed a framework that separately identifies the efficiency units embodied in unskilled labor, skilled labor, and capital in a country’s aggregate production function. Applying that framework to cross-country data, we showed that countries where unskilled labor is relatively abundant are those with the most efficient unskilled workers, while countries where skilled labor and capital are abundant are the most efficient users of these inputs. We interpreted these findings as evidence of appropriatetechnology adoption: in each country firms choose from a menu of technologies; different technologies imply different combinations of values for the efficiency units embodied in the three factors of production; in each country the technology is chosen that makes the most of the most abundant factors. In this paper we apply the same framework to time-series data from the United States over the period 1963–1992. We find that throughout this period the efficiencies of skilled labor and capital have risen. The efficiency of unskilled labor has risen in tandem with those of the other factors in the early part of the sample, but surprisingly, it has been falling since sometime in the 1970’s (the exact turning point depends somewhat on some parametric assumptions). In analogy with the cross-country evidence, these changes are closely associated with changes in the relative abundance of skilled labor and capital, which increased rather dramatically. In this sense, the recent history of technologies in use by U.S. firms may mimic the choice of technologies around the world today: as skills and capital become more abundant, technologies are chosen that maximize the efficiency of these inputs. As we discuss below, however, in the U.S. context the converse story (relative labor supplies adjusting to exogenous changes in technology) is also consistent with the data. Besides its relevance to models of technology adoption, this evidence also sheds new light on the widely documented recent increase in the skilled wage premium in the United States. Lawrence F. Katz and Kevin M. Murphy (1992) and David H. Autor et al. (1998) used the relative wage and the relative labor supply series to show that the efficiency of unskilled labor relative to skilled labor must have declined over time. Our framework allows us to go further and show that, indeed, the absolute efficiency of unskilled labor has fallen (after 1970), while the efficiency of skilled labor and capital have increased. A similar result was obtained with different techniques by Marta Ruiz Arranz (2001).

Industrialisation with a menu of technologies: Appropriate technologies and the `big push'

The recent formal literature on industrialisation considers the technological choice space as a simple binary choice between a constant returns and increasing returns technology. The latter involves a large fixed cost yielding labour productivity gains. In line with arguments based on the availability of `appropriate' technologies, this paper considers a continuous technology space – the level of fixed costs is assumed to be endogenous with greater levels resulting in progressively higher labour productivity. Under this alternative assumption, it is shown that conclusions regarding the multiplicity of decentralised equilibria are not robust to this change and that a unique equilibrium can easily result. Finally, the social optimality of the equilibrium outcomes are analysed.

Industrialization with a Menu of Technologies: Appropriate Technologies and the "Big Push"

The recent formal literature on industrialization considers the technological choice space as a simple binary choice between a constant returns and increasing returns technology. The latter involves a large fixed cost yielding labor productivity gains. In line with arguments based on the availability of appropriate technologies, this paper considers a continuous technology space--the level of fixed costs is assumed to be endogenous with greater levels resulting in progressively higher labor productivity. Under this alternative assumption, it is shown that conclusions regarding the multiplicity of decentralized equilibria are not robust to this change and that a unique equilibrium can easily result. Finally, the social optimality of the equilibrium outcomes are analyzed.