In general, reported rates of return to agricultural R&D are high, but questions have been raised about upward biases in the evidence. Among the reasons for this bias, insufficient attention to attribution aspects-matching of research benefits and costs-is a pervasive problem, the magnitude of...

Reproduced with permission from the International Food Policy Research Institute www.ifpri.org. Originally published as: Pardey, Philip; Beintema, Nienke M. 2001. Slow magic: agricultural R&D a century after Mendel. (Food Policy Report) Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research...

In this paper we present measures of land and labor productivity for a group of 98 developed and developing countries using an entirely new data set with annual observations spanning the past three decades. The substantial cross-country and intertemporal variation in productivity in our sample...