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...

To investigate whether intellectual property rights (IPRs) promote or hinder seed technology diffusion through trade, we use panel data for 134 countries over the period 1985-2010 to evaluate the impact of a country’s IPRs on its seed imports from the U.S. by estimating a gravity equation...

This paper analyzes the extent to which the reduction of import tariffs – as a measure of import competition – affects the rate of quality upgrading in the agri-food sector. This relation is studied using highly disaggregated EU-15 import data from more than 70 countries in thousands of food...

Global simulation models are increasingly used to assess future scenarios and the impact of policies related to food security, land use and climate change. A crucial element in these studies are assumptions on productivity change and technical progress, the key drivers of long-run economic...