Recent trends in farm productivity and food prices raise concerns about whether the era of global agricultural abundance is over. Agricultural R&D is a crucial determinant of agricultural productivity and production, and therefore food prices and poverty. In this paper we review past and present...

This paper uses a new panel data set to examine sources of growth in African agriculture. While conventional inputs continue to be the main source of labor productivity growth in Africa, land and labor quality differentials are also significant in explaining observed cross-country productivity...

Commissioned by the CGIAR Science Council and prepared as a Background Paper for the 2008 World Development Report of the World Bank.

This is a prepublication version of J.M. Beddow, T.M. Hurley, P.G. Pardey, and J.M. Alston’s “Food Security: Yield Gap” chapter in N. Van Alfen, editor-in-chief, Encyclopedia of Agriculture and Food Systems, Vol. 3, San Diego: Elsevier, 2014, pp. 352-365.

Some studies have reported a slowdown in U.S. farm productivity growth, but the prevalent view among economists is to reject or downplay the slowdown hypothesis, implying that the rates of productivity growth experienced over the past half century can be projected forward. We set out to resolve...

This is a substantially revised version of “Capital Use Intensity and Productivity Biases.” Andersen, Matt A.; Alston, Julian M.; Pardey, Philip G., St. Paul, MN: University of Minnesota, Department of Applied Economics; University of Minnesota, International Science and Technology Practice...

Measures of productivity growth are often pro-cyclical. This study focuses on measurement errors in capital inputs, associated with unobserved variations in capital utilization rates, as an explanation for the existence of pro-cyclical patterns in measures of agricultural productivity. Recently...

Over the past 50 years and longer, the supply of food commodities has grown faster than the effective market demand, in spite of increasing population and per capita incomes. Consequently, the real (deflated) prices of food commodities have steadily trended down. The past increases in...