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Unpacking the Agricultural Black Box: The Rise and Fall of American Farm Productivity Growth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2021

Philip G. Pardey  and
Julian M. Alston
Philip G. Pardey
Affiliation:
Professor, Department of Applied Economics and director of International Science and Technology Practice and Policy (InSTePP) center, University of Minnesota, 248B Ruttan Hall 1994 Buford Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55108. E-mail: ppardey@umn.edu.
Julian M. Alston
Affiliation:
Distinguished Professor, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California-Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616. E-mail: jmalston@ucdavis.edu. He is also director of the Robert Mondavi Institute Center for Wine Economics at UC Davis, a member of the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics, and a research fellow at InSTePP.
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Abstract

Has the golden age of U.S. agricultural productivity growth ended? We analyze the detailed patterns of productivity growth spanning a century of profound changes in American agriculture. We document a substantial slowing of U.S. farm productivity growth, following a late mid-century surge—20 years after the surge and slowdown in U.S. industrial productivity growth. We posit and empirically probe three related explanations for this farm productivity surge-slowdown: the time path of agricultural R&D-driven knowledge stocks; a big wave of technological progress associated with great clusters of inventions; and dynamic aspects of the structural transformation of agriculture, largely completed by 1980.

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Type
Article
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 81 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 114 - 155
Copyright
© The Economic History Association 2021

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Footnotes

Both authors contributed equally to this paper. The authors thank Matthew Andersen for his collaboration on prior work, which this paper deepens and extends, and are grateful for the excellent research assistance provided by Connie Chan-Kang, Yuan Chai, Mason Hurley, and Shanchao Wang. Trey Malone, Kevin Novan, Alan Olmstead, Paul Rhode, Scott Swinton, and Felicia Wu provided helpful comments and suggestions, as did other participants at various workshops and conferences, as well as two referees. The work for this project was partly supported by the University of California, the University of Minnesota (MIN-14-161), and the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics.

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