The purpose of this paper is to estimate the cost structures and resource productivities involved in production of four major U.S. field crops and to estimate the distribution among producers of benefits from production related technology. These field crops include corn, soybeans, wheat and...

Economic analysis of the process of technical change has often involved macro-level studies of its causes and consequences. Relatively little attention has been given to the, more fundamental knowledge generation process itself. This stems in large part from the real difficulties of obtaining...

Though the case for maintaining the even increasing agricultural resource productivity seems quite clear, the definition of maintenance research seems to be less so. I will proceed with an examination of what maintenance research is perceived to be, and how it is to be differentiated from...

The purpose of developing new crop technology is generally to increase yields per unit of land and to reduce costs per unit of product. A rather elaborate' methodology has been developed to measure the rates of return from such investments, principally involving ex post analysis. Improvements to...

It is widely accepted that new technology is an important source of agricultural growth. Developing countries have tried a variety of policies to accelerate the development and diffusion of new technology. These policies include: (1) government investment in agricultural research and extension,...

Duality theory and static multi-product technology have been applied to analyze aggregate agricultural data by Shumway; Weaver; and McKay, Lawrence and Vlastuin. Several studies (e.g., Antle; Binswanger; and Lopez, 1985a) have indexed technology with a time trend, but no study has attempted to...

Following World War II, pest control largely shifted from a biological discipline to a chemical one. Unilateral dependence on pesticides has also resulted in concentrating effort on developing high-yield crop varieties with disregard for loss of characters for tolerance or resistance to pests....

The growth in agricultural productivity and significance of science and technology in contributing to this growth has been well documented by Bredahl, Cline, Evenson (1967), Griliches (1964), and Peterson. The results of these studies generally indicate that over the past several decades,...

A wealth of information exists on ex post returns to research investments for agriculture in the aggregate and for several agricultural commodity groups of commercial importance in the United States. Many of the investments made in agricultural research and, consequently, many of the allocative...