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...

For more than two decades, the United States has been an important player in a global partnership for agricultural research through its investments in the work of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a network of 16 agricultural research centers around the...

Agricultural research and development (R&D) is big business. Worldwide investments in public-sector agricultural R&D totaled about US$17 billion in 1990. But "business as usual" may not be sustainable. As governments trim budgets, public support for national and international research is coming...

The past 50-100 years have witnessed dramatic changes in agricultural production and productivity, driven to a great extent by public and private investments in agricultural research, with profound implications especially for the world's poor. In this article, we first discuss how the...

Agricultural research has transformed agriculture and in doing so contributed to the transformation of economies. Economic issues arise because agricultural research is subject to various market failures, because the resulting innovations and technological changes have important economic...

This paper begins with a review of the methods and assumptions used to measure capital service flows. Two data series on capital inputs in U.S. agriculture are briefly described and compared. We show that measures of capital services are sensitive to the treatment of interest rates. Notably, the...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/22/11. Former Title: Revisiting the Returns to U.S. Public Agricultural Research: New Measures, Models, Results, and Interpretation