Search

Many researchers and commentators underestimate the length and importance of the time lags between initial research investment and ultimate impacts on the development and adoption of technological innovations. In both econometric studies of productivity and ex post and ex ante benefit-cost evaluations of research investments, researchers typically impose untested assumptions about the R&D lag, which can have profound implications for the results. In this paper we present a range of evidence on agricultural R&D lags including both aggregative analysis of U.S. agricultural productivity using time series data, and some specific details on the timelines for the research, development, and adoption processes for particular mechanical and biological innovations in U.S. agriculture. The aggregative analysis makes use of a comparatively rich state-level data set on U.S. agriculture that makes it possible to test hypotheses about the R&D lag and to evaluate the implications for the specification of models of production and for findings regarding the rate of return to public research investments. The results support the use of a longer lag with a different shape than is typically imposed in studies of industrial R&D. These findings are supported by the timelines for specific technological innovations, including new crop varieties, as well as tractors and other mechanical innovations.

An important inference of the theoretical literature on the development of general purpose technologies is that public investment in their development is necessary if economic growth is to be sustained. The theoretical results are broadly consistent with the empirical generalization that the public sector, particularly military and defense related research, technology development and procurement, has played an important role in the development of most of the general purpose technologies in which the United States is presently globally competitive. These sources are, however, unlikely to play such an important role in the development of new general purpose technologies in the immediate future. Nor is the private sector, burdened by impatient capital, likely to become an important source of new general purpose technology.

In this paper I review the theories of induced technical and institutional change. I discuss the sources of the demand and supply of institutional innovation. The sources of institutional innovation are illustrated by changes in land tenure relations in Philippine agriculture, by the development of institutional design principles based on studies of small scale resource management systems and by the transition from command and control to market based systems of resource management in the United States. I introduce the concept of incentive compatible mechanism and institutional design. In a final section I elaborate a pattern model that maps the relationships among changes in resource endowments, cultural endowments, technology and institutions.

Prior to the middle of the twentieth century the margins that have demarcated the subject matter of the several social sciences had been relatively stable since the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Since mid-century, however, a number of intellectual and institutional developments have conspired to call into question traditional disciplinary boundaries. In this paper I address the role of disciplinary imperialism, colonialism and collaboration in advancing social science knowledge about development processes and in the design of development policy and institutions. I conclude the paper with several case studies of collaboration across disciplines that have advanced knowledge and practice in the field of development.

In this paper I present case studies of the history of Nation Building in the United States and Turkey. In the United States the nation building project involved the transition of thirteen British colonies to a nation state. In the case of Turkey the nation building project involved a transition from a multinational empire to a Turkish Republic The motivation for writing the two case studies was the abrupt shift in policy by the Bush Administration following the terrorist attack on the New York World Trade Center Towers on September 1, 2001. During his presidential campaign and during his first months in office George W. Bush vigorously criticized what he interpreted as the nation building efforts of the Clinton administration. Before the end of its first year in office the Bush administration had committed American lives and resources to nation building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. My first effort was to write a short paper in an op-ed style. “Why Is Nation Building So Bloody?†This paper serves as Chapter 1.0 of this paper. My second effort was to read widely in the classic political science nation building literature and in the more recent policy oriented literature. An example of the first is the collected works of Stein Rokkan, edited by Peter Flora, State Formation, Nation Building, And Mass Politics In Europe: The Theory Of Stein Rokkan (Oxford 1999). Rokkan’s work had been published largely between 1960 and the early 1990s. An example of the more policy oriented work was the book edited by Rancis Fukuyama, Nation Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq (Johns Hopkins, 2006). I found much of the scholarly work too formal and abstract for my taste. I found the policy oriented work too close to the policy process to provide an objective perspective. My response was to step back and read in some depth the history of the United States and Turkey nation building projects. The result is this paper. In the case of both the United States and Turkey the nation building efforts were largely a response to internal political and economic forces.

A number of very careful econometric studies have been interpreted as showing that publicly funded research and development conducted by private firms has had little discernable impact on firm level profits or productivity. In contrast historical studies have shown that military and defense-related research development and procurement conducted by private firms has been an important source of technology development across a broad spectrum of U.S. manufacturing industries. Careful narrative analysis represents a more effective way of capturing the complementarities between military and defense-related research, development, and procurement on commercial technology development than econometric analysis.

New radical general purpose technologies have been the drivers of economic growth in the United States economy in recent economic history. In this paper I review the role of military and defense related research, technology development, and procurement in the development of the aircraft, nuclear power, computer, semiconductor, internet and the space communication and earth observing industries. The development of each of these industries would have been substantially delayed in the absence of support for research, technology development and procurement by the military and defense related agencies. Rates of productivity and output growth would have been substantially slower. By the early 1990's it was becoming clear that changes in the United States economy, of the defense industrial base, and in United States military and defense strategy meant that the defense and defense related industries would no longer play a prominent role in the development of new general purpose technologies. There has been a relative decline in investment in basic research and in early stage technology development in the private sector. The United States has yet to develop a coherent strategy for the public support of commercial technology development. My own sense is that when the history of United States technology development for the next half century is eventually written it will be characterized by incremental rather than revolutionary changes in both military and commercial technology. It will also be written in the context of slower productivity and output growth than the rates that prevailed in the United States during the first several post war decades or since the beginning of the information technology bubble that began in the early 1990s.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that military and defense related research and procurement have been a major source of commercial technology development across a broad spectrum of industries that account for an important share of United States industrial production. I discuss the development of five general purpose technologies: (1) military and commercial aircraft, (2) nuclear energy and electric power, (3) computers and semiconductors, (4) the Internet, and (5) the space industries. The defense industrial base has become a smaller share of the industrial sector which is itself a declining sector in the U.S. economy. It is doubtful that military and defense related procurement will again become an important source of new general purpose technologies. When the history of U.S. technology development for the next half century is eventually written it will almost certainly be written within the context of slower productivity growth than the relatively high rates that prevailed in the U.S through the 1960's and during the information technology bubble that began in the early 1990's.

In this paper I advance a model in which institutional innovation is induced by changes in resource endowments, cultural endowments and technical change. I also introduce the role of advances in social science knowledge as a source of institutional innovation. The sources of institutional innovation are illustrated by changes in land tenure and labor relations in Philippine agriculture, by the development of institutional design principles based on studies of small scale resource management, and by the transition from command and control to market based systems of resource management at the national level in the United States. In a final section I elaborate a pattern model that maps the general equilibrium relationship among change in resource endowments, cultural endowments, technology and institutions.

For almost half a century World War II and the Cold War provided the political and fiscal context for public investment in science and technology. The report prepared by Vannevar Bush, Science: the Endless Frontier (1945), advanced an investment rationale for federal support of scientific research. In spite of pressure from Congress and the Office of the President the scientific community has resisted the development and application of operational economic criteria for the allocation of research resources.

In this paper I advance a model in which institutional innovation is induced by changes in resource endowments, cultural endowments and technical change. I also introduce the role of advances in social science knowledge as a source of institutional innovation. The sources of institutional innovation are illustrated by changes in land tenure and labor relations in Philippine agriculture and by the transition from command and control to market based systems of resource management in the United States. In a final section I elaborate a pattern model that maps the general equilibrium relationship among change in resource endowments, cultural endowments, technology and institutions.

The development and introduction of transgenically modified organisms to enhance crop and animal production has generated considerable controversy about potential food safety and environmental impacts. The introduction in tropical Latin America and Asia of high yielding varieties of wheat, maize and rice beginning in the late 1960s was also controversial. Critics argued that the new technology was biased against the poor-would make the rich richer and the poor poorer. In this paper I review the equity and productivity impacts of the "green revolution" technology and draw several inferences about evaluation the effects of the new biotechnologies in agricultural production.

In the new science and technology policy literature that emerged in the early 1980s it was held, while public support for science is appropriate, public support for technology development represents an unproductive use of public resources. The perspective that emerges in my recent book, Technology, Growth and Development: An Induced Innovation Perspective is quite different. Government has played an important role in technology development and transfer in almost every U.S. industry that has become competitive on a global scale.

There is strong synergy among research, education, technology development and technology transfer. Examples of successful public-private technology transfer linkage institutions are provided. But efforts to document the benefits of research conducted at the University of Minnesota to the state have rarely been conducted with the rigor that would be required to meet the test of professional credibility. A program of research to develop more rigorous evidence on economic benefits to the State is proposed.

In work published in the 1980's Yujro Hayami and I elaborated a theory of institutional innovations in which institutional changes are induced, on the demand side, by changes in relative resource endowments and technical change and, on the supply side, by changes in cultural endowments and advances in social science knowledge. In the mid-1980's I initiated a research program to explore what development economists might learn from research by other social scientists working in the field of development. In this paper I draw on this earlier work, and on related literature to explore the conditions under which interdisciplinary imperialism or interdisciplinary collaboration can be most productive. I argue that when the objective of research is to advance fundamental knowledge in the social sciences imperialism can be highly productive. But where multiple sources of knowledge must be drawn on for policy, mechanism, or system design interdisciplinary collaboration is essential.

Includes four papers: Challenges to International Agricultural Research; Biotechnology: The Rate of Public Policy; Science, Technology and Surprise: Implications for Agriculture; Meeting the Food Needs of the World

Since their emergence as a distinct fields of inquiry in the early post World War II period there has been an uneasy relationship between growth economics and development economics. The emergence of a richer 'new growth economics' has opened up the possibilities of a more fruitful dialogue between the two subdisciplines. In spite of recent advances, particularly with respect to the human capital, and understanding of differences in growth rates and income levels across countries remains elusive. Further advances will require that growth economists broaden their research agenda to embrace a number of concepts that have become conventional in development economics.

The goal of this paper is to better understand how technological change has contributed to structural change in the U.S. livestock industry. The paper presents a cross-sector analysis of the diffusion of improved breeding technologies and industry structure in poultry, swine, dairy and beef cattle. Patterns of technological change are reviewed and compared to the predictions of a standard model of technology diffusion. The results suggest the need for a more dynamic view of technology diffusion. The paper offers several specific observations about technological and structural change in this industry that have relevance for public policy.

The 1960s through the 1980s were very productive of new theory and empirical insight into the sources of technical change. In this paper I argue that each of the three approaches that have been advanced--induced technical change, evolutionary theory and path dependence--is approaching a dead end. The induced technical change process is driven by changes in the economic environment in which the firm (or public research agency) finds itself. But its internal mechanism, the learning and search process, remain inside a black box. The evolutionary model builds on the behavioral theory of the firm in an attempt to provide a more realistic description of the internal workings of the black box. The strength of the path dependence interpretation lies in the importance it places on the sequence of specific micro-level historical events. But it holds only for network technologies characterized by increasing returns to scale--and only until the increasing returns have been exhausted. The three approaches should be regarded as components of a more general theory of the sources of technical change. In the later section of the paper steps that might be taken toward the development of a more general theory of the sources of technical change are suggested.

In 1989 the revolutions in several Eastern European countries brought an end to The Soviet European empire and ultimately the Cold War. This paper examines the effect the end of the Soviet threat had on America's foreign assistance programs in general, and specifically on US attempts to aid the New Independent States (NIS) and the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs). Over the course of the years, America's foreign assistance programs have been motivated by a combination of national security considerations, economic self- interest, and humanitarian concerns. However, the US desire to stem Soviet expansion, first in Europe, then in South East Asia, and then in other Third World countries, came to dominate assistance policy. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the common thread of foreign aid goals, the threat of Soviet expansion, also disappeared. Lack of a strong, clear goal for foreign aid, coupled with a new isolationist sentiment and deficit reduction pressures have resulted in a foreign aid crisis. America's foreign aid program suffers from a lack of focus and foreign assistance resources continue to decline. An examination of the record and rationale behind US assistance to the NIS and the CEECs supports this perspective.

Cover photo, Findings, Editorial by Vernon W. Ruttan (Global Research Systems for Sustainable Development: Agriculture, Health, and Environment), About the authors, Table of contents.

In this paper I review the evolution of the sustainability concept. This is followed by a description of three "classical" systems of sustainable agriculture. None of these systems were or are capable of generating growth of output consistent with modern rates of growth in demand. I then turn to three unresolved analytical issues that continue to divide the conventional resource economics and the sustainable development communities. In a closing section I argue sustainable growth in agricultural production should be viewed as a research agenda rather than as a package of practices that is available to producers whether in developed or developing countries.

Books reviewed include: The Green Revolution Reconsidered: The Impact of High Yielding Rice Varieties in South India by Peter B.R. Hazell and C. Ramasamy; Disarray in World Food Markets: A Quantitative Assessment by Rod Tyers and Kym Anderson; The World Food Problem: Tackling the Causes of Undernutrition in the Third World by Phillips Foster and Lynne Rienner; Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology: The Contemporary Core Literature by Wallace Olsen