Land quality and land degradation affect agricultural productivity, but quantifying these relationships has been difficult. Data are limited, and impacts are sensitive to the choices that farmers make. Summarizing new research by economists, soil scientists, and geographers, this report explores...

Pro-poor growth has been identified as one of the most promising pathways to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) or any subsequent set of goals aiming to reduce poverty worldwide. Related research has developed a multitude of instruments to measure pro-poor growth using absolute and...

The paper examines agricultural production and productivity growth in two Central Asian countries – Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Both countries are characterized by a significant shift of resources from the traditional Soviet model of collective agriculture to more market-compliant individual...

This paper estimates the Total Factor Productivity (TFP) index for the U.S. agricultural sector from the period 1970 to 2004 and decomposes the resulting TFP estimation in the Trans-logarithmic production function for U.S. agriculture for the same period to determine the residual measure that...

This paper estimates the Total Factor Productivity (TFP) index for the U.S. agricultural sector from the period 1970 to 2004 and decomposes the resulting TFP estimation in the Trans-logarithmic production function for U.S. agriculture for the same period to determine the residual measure that...

A Chronological Study of TFP and Agricultural Growth in U.S. Agriculture

Deteriorating food security status is primarily a local phenomenon resulting from failures in food systems and inadequate incomes. Technological advances in agriculture have led to declining long-term trends in food prices, which have assisted in improving diets. It is projected that in the...

Despite being framed as a key component of the nation’s poverty reduction strategy, evidence suggests that inputs distributed under Zambia’s Farmer Input Support Programme (FISP) tend to be targeted to the least poor rural households.

Despite upward trends in fertilizer application rates on maize fields over the last twenty years, there remains a perception in Kenya that fertilizer use is not expanding quickly enough and that application rates are not high enough to reverse the country’s growing national food deficit. In...

Global agriculture must significantly increase production to meet by mid-century the demands for food, feed, and fiber posed by the world’s enlarging population. An important requirement to meeting those demands is a lifting of agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) growth rates. The...