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In the last two centuries, the reallocation of labor out of agriculture has been a dominant feature of structural change and economic growth in the United States. This paper uses an accounting framework founded in economic theory to decompose this reallocation into three components: a demand-side effect due to the low income elasticity of demand for agricultural goods (Engel effect), and two supply-side effects, one due to differential sectoral productivity growth rates (Baumol effect), and the other to differential capital deepening. The results show that the Engel effect accounts for almost all labor reallocation until the 1950s, after which the Baumol effect becomes a key determinant. Our framework provides a unified account of long-run structural change, and demonstrates that historical interpretations and theoretical models that emphasize only one dimension of this process cannot properly account for the dramatic history of labor reallocation in the United States. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We present a joint study of the U.S. structural transformation (the decline of agriculture as the dominating sector) and regional convergence (of southern to northern average wages). We find empirically that most of the regional convergence is attributable to the structural transformation: the nationwide convergence of agricultural wages to nonagricultural wages and the faster rate of transition of the southern labor force from agricultural to nonagricultural jobs. Similar results describe the Midwest's catch-up to the Northeast (but not the relative experience of the West). To explain these observations, we construct a model in which the South (Midwest) has a comparative advantage in producing unskilled labor-intensive agricultural goods. Thus it starts with a disproportionate share of the unskilled labor force and lower per capita incomes. Over time, declining education/training costs induce an increasing proportion of the labor force to move out of the (unskilled) agricultural sector and into the (skilled) nonagricultural sector. The decline in the agricultural labor force leads to an increase in relative agricultural wages. Both effects benefit the South (Midwest) disproportionately since it has more agricultural workers. With the addition of a less than unit income elasticity of demand for farm goods and faster technological progress in farming than outside of farming, this model successfully matches the quantitative features of the U.S. structural transformation and regional convergence, as well as several other stylized facts on U.S. economic growth in the last century. The model does not rely on frictions on interregional labor and capital mobility, since in our empirical work we find this channel to be less important than the compositional effects the model emphasizes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on factor input efficiency and technological bias with application to the U.S. agriculture. Technical progress is an important factor contributing to growth. In a "disembodied" form, its impact on a factor input is measured in terms of the ratio of that input measured in both efficiency and conventional units. It is customary to use value added rather than gross output when measuring the technological bias resulting from differences in the growth rates of inputs expressed in efficiency units. In this paper, authors consider a linear homogeneous production function in the form of a mathematical equation. The data used in the study were drawn from the U.S. farm sector and covers the period 1949 to 1970. The time series used include measures of value-added by the farm sector, the number of man-hours worked, the wage rate, the total capital stock in existence including machinery, livestock, crops and financial assets; and interest rate, consisting of the average rate on loans charged by the production credit associations. Value-added was deflated by the index of prices received by farmers; capital was deflated by a GNP price index; and the wage rate was deflated by the consumer price index.

Community-focused agriculture has been heralded as a development strategy to induce local economic growth. This study examines county-level linkages between community-focused agriculture and growth in total agricultural sales and economic growth more broadly. Using Census of Agriculture data, regional growth models are estimated on real personal income per capita change between 2002 and 2007. We find no association between community-focused agriculture and growth in total agricultural sales at the national level, but do in some regions of the United States. A $1 increase in farm sales led to an annualized increase of $0.04 in county personal income. With few exceptions, community-focused agriculture did not make significant contributions to economic growth in the time period analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relations between economic growth and economic progress. The author states that economic growth and progress have not moved in tandem in the U.S. He suggests that social democracy and a guaranteed income policy are possible means to achieve a rough equality between growth and progress. However, he does not argue that a high level of gross domestic product (GDP) is a social evil. A large GDP per capita means that a society has moved out of subsistence farming, a prerequisite for complex, urban societies. Moreover, he asserts that economic growth does not automatically translate into a rising degree of security in the consumption of fundamental needs for the least advantaged.

One of the most profound changes in the United States in the past century is the national abandonment of farming as a livelihood strategy. This change is evident both in the exodus of Americans from farming and in the conditions faced by the farmers remaining, most of whom are marginal producers in an increasingly concentrated industry. In this article, we provide a retrospective account of the empirical and sociological fate of family farmers. While sociologists have had longstanding interest in agrarian change, research on contemporary farmers is largely confined to specialty publications, with a loss to the discipline at large. We examine three distinct research traditions that continue to document farm transformation: research on macro-level transformation, community impacts, and household response. While these traditions evolved separately, we describe how they overlap and inform each other. Most notably, research on household and community responses delineates meso- and micro-level institutional factors that extend macro-level theory. Research on the contemporary farm population offers an alternative context in which to intenogate conventional accounts of economic development; such research yields insights about aspects of social life being rediscovered as part of the new economy and continues to pull sociologists into politically charged public policy debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has become fashionable to advocate faster economic growth as the elixir to cure all that ails American society. Surely average annual growth rate in the neighborhood of 2 percent is anemic, whether one views it in historical terms or by the current standards of the economies of China and Southeast Asia. Faster growth produces all sorts of good things, such as lower budget deficits, more new jobs, higher incomes and rising living standards. Cutting income taxes alone is not going to energize the economy sufficiently to prevent a rise in the budget deficit. On the basis of experience — the author also bear the scars of the 1981-82 cycle-those deficits can lead to a variety of negative effects, ranging from a diminution of investment capital available for private business expansion to scaring the Fed into tightening the flow of money and credit. Subsidies inherently divert resources away from their most productive uses. Subsidies to agriculture are the largest component of the subsidy category.

The nation whose agriculture is analyzed in this article is almost solely that of the United States. Other nations will be brought into it only where international trade and other relations are involved. The analysis begins with a statement of the relative magnitude and importance of agriculture in the nation's economy, and past trends in the same, according to several measures. This is followed by projections of the changes in these magnitudes by 1975 and after, and accompanying changes in land use. Then, comes an analysis of the welfare aspects of the subject, how agriculture is sharing in the national income and improvements in living, and the outlook for the same. The magnitude and importance of agriculture in the nation's economy can be measured in several ways, with wide differences in the results. No one of these measures gives the whole picture. Two series on the farm labor force are given in the article, the first, that of the United States Bureau of the Census, which includes only those whose usual or chief activity is in agriculture, and the second, that of the United States Department of Agriculture, which counts all persons working on farms regardless of chief activity.