Technological advances developed through R&D have supplied the world with not only more food, but better food. This report looks at issues raised by this changing environment for agricultural productivity, agricultural R&D, and natural resource management.

Transgenic crops are relatively new technologies being adopted rapidly in the United States and in a few other countries. The economic impacts of these technologies have, thus far, been estimated in a piecemeal fashion. The purpose of this study was to collect and characterize the economic...

A total of 294 studies of returns to agricultural R&D (including extension) were compiled and these studies provide 1,858 separate estimates of rates of return. This includes some extreme values, which are implausible. When the highest and lowest 2.5 percent of the rates of return were set...

Governments around the globe are trimming their support for agricultural R&D, giving greater scrutiny to the support that they do provide, and reforming the public agencies that fund, oversee, and carry out the research. These contemporary developments represent a break from previous patterns,...

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...

Econometric studies of the effects of research on productivity have typically imposed arbitrary restrictions on the length and shape of the R&D lag profile. These restrictions are likely to have biased up both the measured effects of R&D on productivity and the estimated rates of return to...

This brief summarizes the book, Agricultural R&D in the Developing World: Too Little, Too Late?, edited by Philip G. Pardey, Julian M. Alston, and Roley R. Piggott. The authors of the brief look at topics such as: International spillovers of public agricultural R&D; patterns of worldwide public...

IFPRI has long argued that spending on agricultural research constitutes a sound investment in poverty reduction and agricultural and economic growth, through improvements in productivity. This argument is based partly on the reported evidence of high rates of return to agricultural research,...