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

This book covers the evolving path of U.S. agriculture in the 20th Century and the role of public research and development in that evolution. Through detailed analysis, it shows that the benefits of public investment in agriculture greatly outweigh the costs. 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 the policy failures since the 1970s giving rise to a slowdown in farm productivity in the past10–20 years. ―Alan L. Olmstead. Distinguished Research Professor, Department of Economics, University of California, Davis and co-author of Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development, Cambridge University Press, 2008 This book presents new solid empirical evidence about the past, current and required future role of research and innovations to prepare U.S. agriculture to meet future domestic and international food demand in a sustainable manner. The economic rates of return are high and spillovers across states are large. The authors make a strong and well-supported case for expanding federal funding for agricultural research. Global food demand is likely to double over the next 50 years. Given the long time lag between research investments and productivity gains, documented in this book, and the recent global food crisis, expanded investments are long overdue. Policy-makers, advisors and analysts should pay attention to the findings reported in this book and take appropriate action now to stop the current trend of decreasing rates of pro