Contained in:
Book Chapter

The impact of public research expenditure on agricultural productivity: evidence from developed European countries

  • Alessandro Magrini

The objective of this paper is to assess the impact of public research expenditure on agricultural productivity in developed European countries. Our research provides original evidence, making possible a comparison with existing studies focused on United States of America (USA). We apply a fixed effects Gamma distributed-lag model to yearly data in 1970-2016 sourced from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In our results, public research expenditure has a significant impact on agricultural productivity up to 35 years, with peak at 17 years and long-term elasticity equal to 0.172. Based on our model, the countries with the highest internal rate of return of agricultural research expenditure resulted Germany, Spain, France and Italy (24.5-25.2%), followed by Netherlands, United Kingdom, Denmark, Greece, Belgium and Luxembourg (20.5-21.8%). However, only Germany, Denmark and Greece increased agricultural research expenditure in recent years. The estimated internal rates of return are in line with the ones reported by existing studies on USA, and they suggest that developed European countries, just like USA, could benefit from research investments in Agriculture to a much greater extent than they currently do.

  • Keywords:
  • European Agriculture,
  • Gamma lag distribution,
  • return of public,
  • expenditure,
  • research lag,
  • total factor productivity,
+ Show More

Alessandro Magrini

University of Florence, Italy - ORCID: 0000-0002-7278-5332

  1. Alston, J. M., Pardey, P. G. (2014). Agriculture in the global economy. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 28(1), pp. 121-146.
  2. Andersen, M. A. (2019). Knowledge productivity and the returns to agricultural research: a review. Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 63(2), pp. 205-220.
  3. Baldos, U. L. C., Viens, F. G., Hertel, T. W., Fuglie, K. O. (2018). R&D spending, knowl- edge capital, and agricultural productivity growth: a Bayesian approach. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 101(1), pp. 291-310.
  4. Dickey, D. A., Fuller, W. A. (1981). Likelihood ratio statistics for autoregressive time series with a unit root. Econometrica, 49(4), pp. 1057-1072.
  5. Fuglie, K. O. (2018). Is agricultural productivity slowing? Global Food Security, 17, pp. 73-83.
  6. Fuglie, K. O., Clancy, M., Heisey, P., McDonald, J. (2017). Research, productivity, and output growth in U.S. agriculture. Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics, 49(4), pp. 514-554.
  7. Granger, C. W. J., Newbold, P. (1974). Spurious regressions in econometrics. Journal of Econo- metrics, 2(2), pp. 111-120.
  8. Guesmi, B., Gil, J. M. (2017). Measuring the impact of agricultural research on Catalan agricul- tural productivity. Proceedings of the XV EAAE Congress, Towards Sustainable Agri-food Systems: Balancing Between Markets and Society, Aug. 29th – Sep. 1st, 2017, Parma (IT).
  9. Lemarie´, S., Orozco, V., Butault, J. P., Musolesi, A., Simioni, M., Schmitt, B. (2020). Assessing the long-term impact of agricultural research on productivity: evidence from France. Preprint. https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-02791517
  10. Newey, W. K., West, K. D. (1987). A simple, positive semi-definite, heteroskedasticity and autocorrela- tion consistent covariance matrix. Econometrica, 55(3), pp. 703-708.
  11. Ratinger, T., Kristkova, Z. (2015). R&D Investments, technology spillovers and agricultural productivity, case of the Czech Republic. Agricultural Economics – Czech, 61(7), pp. 297-313.
  12. Schmidt, P. (1974). An argument for the usefulness of the Gamma distributed lag model. International Economic Review, 15(1), pp. 246-250.
  13. Thirtle, C., Piesse, J., Schimmelpfennig, D. (2008). Modelling the length and shape of the R&D lag: an application to UK agricultural productivity. Agricultural Economics, 39(1), pp. 73-85.
PDF
  • Publication Year: 2021
  • Pages: 55-60
  • Content License: CC BY 4.0
  • © 2021 Author(s)

XML
  • Publication Year: 2021
  • Content License: CC BY 4.0
  • © 2021 Author(s)

Chapter Information

Chapter Title

The impact of public research expenditure on agricultural productivity: evidence from developed European countries

Authors

Alessandro Magrini

Language

English

DOI

10.36253/978-88-5518-304-8.12

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2021

Copyright Information

© 2021 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Bibliographic Information

Book Title

ASA 2021 Statistics and Information Systems for Policy Evaluation

Book Subtitle

Book of short papers of the opening conference

Editors

Bruno Bertaccini, Luigi Fabbris, Alessandra Petrucci

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2021

Copyright Information

© 2021 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/978-88-5518-304-8

eISBN (pdf)

978-88-5518-304-8

eISBN (xml)

978-88-5518-305-5

Series Title

Proceedings e report

Series ISSN

2704-601X

Series E-ISSN

2704-5846

274

Fulltext
downloads

282

Views

Export Citation

1,347

Open Access Books

in the Catalogue

2,262

Book Chapters

3,790,127

Fulltext
downloads

4,421

Authors

from 923 Research Institutions

of 65 Nations

65

scientific boards

from 348 Research Institutions

of 43 Nations

1,248

Referees

from 381 Research Institutions

of 38 Nations