Accounting for growth in global agriculture

By K. Fuglie. Bio-based and Applied Economics, 2015

124 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Rising prices of agricultural commodities have renewed concerns about constraints to agricultural productivity. To assess productivity trends, total factor productivity (TFP) is generally preferred to partial productivity indexes as an indicator of technical and efficiency changes because it is more closely related to the unit costs of production. But measuring TFP is demanding of data, and developing comprehensive and comparable indexes of international agricultural TFP has been challenging. This study proposes a growth accounting approach, using FAO data on quantity changes in inputs and outputs and aggregating input changes using cost shares derived from other sources, as a consistent way of constructing agricultural TFP indexes for world agriculture. This produces aggregate growth rates for agricultural output, input and TFP at the country, regional and global levels. Results suggest that the rate of agricultural TFP growth accelerated in recent decades, especially in developing countries. Most regions of the world now rely on productivity-based growth rather than resource-based growth to raise agricultural output.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/96f775859035fc68fe75ad508152d3c28f38d3ca

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In Economics and Econometrics

In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

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Citations in the corpus

R&D Capital, R&D Spillovers, and Productivity Growth in World Agriculture (2018, background): “As countries like China supplant the United States and other developed countries as the primary investors in public agricultural R&D, concerns emerge about where the next generation of frontier technologies might come from.”
The paradox of productivity: agricultural productivity promotes food system inefficiency (2019, unknown): “93% per year during the period 1961–2012 (Fuglie, 2015).”
Middle-range theories of land system change (2018, background): “Over the long term, this process is expected to increase the total factor productivity (TFP), which is the ratio of total output compared to all inputs compounded (Coelli and Rao, 2005; Fuglie, 2015).”