This paper examines the economic determinants and impacts of agricultural research, particularly biotechnology research, with a view to understanding the potential of agricultural biotechnology to address the needs of the poor in developing countries. It surveys public and private agricultural...

The application of modern biotechnology to plant breeding is considered to be more efficient and quicker than conventional breeding techniques in the development of new and more resilient crop varieties. To test the impact that biotechnology is having on a industrial plant breeding activities,...

This paper examines the role of patents in the development and use of two platform technologies for plant biotechnology - plant transformation techniques and structural genomics. We find that patents were important in inducing private firms to develop these platform technologies. There...

The ag-biotech industry underwent considerable consolidation in the last decade in part to take advantage of economics of scale and scope. The paper investigates the impact of such consolidation on inventive activity at the firm level. Careful attention is paid to the role of firm size,...

The objective of this paper is to make a contribution to a debated issue in industrial organization that of the relationship between market structure and innovation. We place this topic within a theoretical framework and in the context of the agricultural biotechnology research market. Our...