This paper focuses on assessing the benefits of research expenditures on maize production in South Africa. Both the production and supply function approaches are used to calculate elasticities of research expenditure on output and yield. Cointegration is used to establish long-run relationships...

This paper provides an empirical investigation into the long-standing notion of biases of technical change in South African agriculture. The second order cost function is used to derive relative bias measures between labour and machinery. The results suggest that large machinery-using biases in...

All the rate of return estimates, regardless of methodology or the level of aggregation, are entirely consistent and logical. The returns show that the ARC has been extremely successful economically and has followed a sound strategy of exploiting spillovers from foreign R&D systems. However,...

Some comments are required to put in perspective the results obtained by Ngwenya, Battese and Fleming (1997). In particular, it is necessary to examine their main conclusion that in 1988/89 there was a significant inverse relationship between the technical inefficiency of wheat farmers in the...

Two different methodologies are linked to determine the effects of climate change on the Western Cape farm sector in South Africa. First, it uses a general circulation model to model climate change. Second, a sectoral mathematical programming model is used to determine these effects on key...

This paper evaluates the production structure of the South African agricultural sector for the period 1970-1998, using a translog function. The results show that the production structure is best represented by production technology that is Hicks-neutral and homothetic. This information is useful...

In Northeast Brazil, despite sustained efforts to reduce rural poverty and more than $3.2 billion in spending, the rural poor are little better off than they were two decades ago. Brazil's difficult macroeconomic environment has tended to restrict the amount of funds available for rural...