Springer Persistence Pays: U.S. Agricultural Productivity Growth and the Benefits from Public R&D Spending: 34 (Natural Resource Management and Policy, 34)

Product Description gricultural science policy in the United States has profoundly affected the growth and development of agriculture worldwide, not just in the A United States. Over the past 150 years, and especially over the second th half of the 20 Century, public investments in agricultural R&D in the United States grew faster than the value of agricultural production. Public spending on agricultural science grew similarly in other more-developed countries, and c- lectively these efforts, along with private spending, spurred agricultural prod- tivity growth in rich and poor nations alike. The value of this investment is seldom fully appreciated. The resulting p- ductivity improvements have released labor and other resources for alternative uses―in 1900, 29. 2 million Americans (39 percent of the population) were - rectly engaged in farming compared with just 2. 9 million (1. 1 percent) today― while making food and fiber more abundant and cheaper. The benefits are not confined to Americans. U. S. agricultural science has contributed with others to growth in agricultural productivity in many other countries as well as the Un- ed States. The world’s population more than doubled from around 3 billion in 1961 to 6. 54 billion in 2006 (U. S. Census Bureau 2009). Over the same period, production of important grain crops (including maize, wheat and rice) almost trebled, such that global per capita grain production was 18 percent higher in 2006. Review From the reviews: Persistence Pays is a definitive source book on the economics of agricultural R&D in the United States. The topical coverage is impressively comprehensive, ranging from discussion of the historical development of U.S. agriculture and U.S. agricultural research policy, through a quantification of the patterns of production and input use, to econometric models of R&D and productivity and their implications. The treatment of particular themes is careful and instructive. The authors provide new, detailed, state-level data on both agricultural R&D investments and productivity, along with a critical survey and review of relevant measures, methods, and models, before presenting brand-new econometric results. These new results refine and extend past work in the area, reinforcing many of the past findings about the high social returns to agricultural research and the persistent patterns of underinvestment. The book has significant technical content that will be primarily of interest to other economists both in the classroom and in research applications, but it is also readily accessible to research administrators and policy makers, well beyond the United States, who wish to understand the links between public research policy, agriculture, and the economy. ―Jock R. Anderson. Emeritus Professor of Agricultural Economics at the University of New England, Armidale, Australia, and Adviser, Agriculture and Rural Development, World Bank, Washington, DC. This is a sophisticated book on a critically important subject. Many people have talked about the importance of public R&D in propelling the growth in American agricultural productivity but there has been scant hard evidence on the issue. Alston, Andersen, James, and Pardey rectify this deficiency with a brilliant book that represents a major contribution to our understanding of technological change―this is the new gold standard in the field. Their achievement is multidimensional―they carefully construct new state-level data series on the quantity and quality of agricultural inputs and outputs, they offer a wealth of information on the institutions and functioning of the public agricultural research system, and they employ well-conceived models and state-of-the-art econometrics to tease out the effects of R&D expenditures on productivity growth. In the process they provide entirely new insights into myriad issues such as the extent of research spillovers, the nature of the lags in R&D investments, and the extent of