Agriculture and national welfare around the world: causality and international heterogeneity since 1960

By Claudio Bravo-Ortega, D. Lederman. 2005

132 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Calculations of marginal welfare effects suggest that agricultural development has had important positive effects on national welfare, especially in developing countries. Latin American and Caribbean countries have also benefited from agricultural growth, but non-agricultural production has had marginal welfare effects that are greater in magnitude than those provided by agricultural activities. In contrast, the industrialized, high-income countries experienced marginal welfare gains from non-agricultural activities that are much greater than those derived from agriculture, whose impact is actually negative. These calculations of marginal welfare effects across regions depend on econometric estimates of elasticities linking agricultural and nonagricultural economic activities to four elements in a national welfare function: national GDP per capita, average income of the poorest households within countries, environmental outcomes concerning air and water pollution and deforestation, and macroeconomic volatility. The econometric analyses are motivated by theoretical treatments of key issues. The empirical models are estimated with various econometric techniques that deal with issues of causality and international heterogeneity.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f7ccd0cbc1d7c7e348d385ca66e2085e63fe1260

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Citations in the corpus

Dial “A” for Agriculture: A Review of Information and Communication Technologies for Agricultural Extension in Developing Countries - Working Paper 269 (2011, unknown): “Cross-country and country-specific econometric evidence have indicated that GDP growth generated in agriculture can be particularly effective in increasing expenditures and incomes of the poor (Ligon and Sadoulet 2007, Bravo-Ortega and Lederman 2005, Ravallion and Chen 2007).”
Agricultural Productivity and Economic Growth (2010, background): “Bravo-Ortega and Lederman (2005) also rely on Granger causality tests in an attempt to trace causal links from agricultural productivity growth to a variety of aggregate welfare measures.”
The Role of Agriculture in Poverty Reduction - An Empirical Perspective (2006, unknown): “Bravo-Ortega and Lederman (2005) find evidence of a positive causal link (in the Granger, 1969, sense) between (lagged) agricultural growth and non-agricultural growth, also for poor countries, though the effect is smaller for Latin America.”
Reflections on the Role of Agriculture in Pro-Poor Growth (2010, unknown): “A recent study by Bravo-Ortega and Lederman (2005), discussed in detail in the recent World Bank study (de Ferranti et al. 2005) mentioned earlier, also examines the links between agricultural growth and the growth of nonagriculture.”
Agriculture and Development: A Brief Review of the Literature (2011, unknown): “Bravo-Ortega and Lederman (2005) employ panel data tools, such as GMM and Granger causality tests, to re-estimate the effect of agricultural growth on the overall growth rate.”
The (Evolving) Role of Agriculture in Poverty Reduction: An Empirical Perspective (2011, methodology): “23 Bravo-Ortega and Lederman (2005) and Tiffin and Irz (2006), for example, rely on internal instruments only (i.e., instruments based on lagged values of the explanatory variables).”
Agricultural Productivity and Poverty Reduction: Linkages and Pathways (2011, unknown): “productivity explains an increasing share of the income for quintiles two and three (the second poorest and median quintiles) for poor countries (Bravo-Ortega and Lederman, 2005).”