Performing Department
Agricultural And Applied Economics
Non Technical Summary
NC-1034 participants are either agricultural economists, resource economists or rural sociologists. Most are also part of multi-disciplinary and multi-state research teams addressing important issues in agricultural technology development, adoption, and impact assessment. As part of those multi-state or multi-disciplinary teams, NC-1034 participants take the lead in research problems associated with socio-economic causes and consequences of technological change. NC-1034 allows participants to share in developing the latest social science methods in evaluating returns to agricultural research and the socio-economic impacts of innovations. Further, NC-1034 allows participants to take these new evaluation methods back to their state and regional teams and apply them to local problems of interest. NC-1034 allows members to benefit indirectly from knowledge gained directly by other members from multi-disciplinary projects. For example, one NC-1034 member may gain valuable knowledge from working on a project with weed scientists or entomologists. Knowledge is thus shared so that social and agricultural scientists may work more effectively together.
Animal Health Component
0%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
70%
Developmental
30%
Goals / Objectives
Measure trends, patterns, and sources of agricultural productivity growth.
Estimate the net benefits of public and private investments in agricultural research and characterize the nature of those benefits to consumers, producers, and the environment.
Analyze decision strategies for funding, planning, managing, and evaluating agricultural research by public and private organizations.
Analyze opportunities, risks, and net benefits from public-private sector linkages and technology transfer arrangements, including joint ventures, partnering, consortia, specialty research centers, start-up companies, and intellectual property arrangements.
Project Methods
Research will continue to refine measurement of agricultural productivity, which measures how much output one can obtain from a given quantity of inputs, or conversely, the resource requirements to generate a given quantity of output. Measuring productivity accurately is a non-trivial issue, as one must determine how to measure changes in the quality of inputs. Although economists are not in complete agreement, there is new and troubling evidence that agricultural productivity growth is slowing down. This leads to policy questions of what has accounted for this slowdown and what might be done to reverse it. Productivity growth has implications for U.S. agricultural exports, world commodity prices, and food security. Agricultural productivity growth accounts for a rising share of the increase in agricultural production, easing pressure on natural resources to supply the rising demand for food. New econometric methods will be combined with conventional and improved measures of agricultural inputs and outputs and the climate to improve assessments of productivity trends.Econometric methods will be employed to estimate what factors account for differences across space and over time in public agricultural research funding and productivity growth. Thus, research will examine the linkages from agricultural R&D investment, to productivity growth, and to food security. Returns to research will be evaluated using a broader set of metrics than just agricultural production. The influence on other outcomes such as nutrition, health, climate, and the environment will be measured and assessed.The Wyoming PI and colleagues at UC Davis and the University of Minnesota have recently developed new techniques for detecting gradual changes in long run time-series data and applied them to data on U.S. agricultural productivity.