Connie Chan-Kang

International and Institutional R&D Spillovers: Attribution of Benefits among Sources for Brazil's New Crop Varieties

In general, reported rates of return to agricultural RD 6.1 percent of the corresponding value of crop output. If all of those benefits were attributed to Embrapa, a public research corporation accounting for more than half Brazils agricultural R&D spending, the benefit-cost ratio would be 78:1. If a geometric attribution rule based on genetic histories is used in conjunction with quantitative evidence on the extent of research collaborations to account for the innovative effort of others, the ratio drops substantially to 16:1 (or an internal rate of return of 38.7 percent). The sources of these gains vary markedly among crops and over time, making it hard to generalize about the international and institutional origins of varietal innovations in Brazilian agriculture during the past several decades.

Long-run and Global R&D Funding Trajectories: The U.S. Farm Bill in a Changing Context

Domestically funded (and performed) research and development (R&D) has historically been a major source of productivity gains in U.S. agriculture, and a principal source of R&D spillovers to the rest of the world. In the waning decades of the 20th century, U.S. policymakers opted to ratchet down the rate of growth in public support for food and agricultural R&D. As the 21st century unfolds, slowing growth has given way to real cutbacks, reversing the accumulation of U.S.-sourced public R&D capital over most of the previous century and more. The 2014 Farm Bill did little to reverse these long-run research funding trajectories—politicians failed to heed the economic evidence about the still substantial social payoffs of that research and the consequent slowdown in U.S. agricultural productivity growth associated with the spending slowdown. Meanwhile, R&D spending by other countries has been moving in different directions. We present new evidence that todays middle-income countries—notably China, Brazil, and India— are not only growing in relative importance as producers of agricultural innovations through investments in public R&D, they are also gaining considerable ground in terms of their share of privately performed research of relevance for agriculture. The already substantive changes in global public and private R&D investment trajectories are accelerating. If history is any guide to the future, these changing R&D trajectories could have profound consequences for the competitiveness of U.S. agriculture in the decades ahead.

Investments in and the Economic Returns to Agricultural and Food R&D Worldwide

The global landscape of public and private investments in research and development (R&D) related to food and agriculture is changing dramatically. Privately performed R&D continues to give a substantial innovative edge to the higher income countries where most of this R&D takes place. However, through their public investments in R&D, the middle-income countries are growing in relative importance as producers of agricultural innovations. This pattern is reinforced by the chronic underinvestment in the lowest-income countries and shrinking investment by the high-income countries. Ample evidence of very high returns to investments in agricultural and food R&D gives strong indications of a persistent underinvestment worldwide.

The Shifting Structure of Agricultural R&D: Worldwide Investment Patterns and Payoffs

The future path and pace of agricultural productivity growth areinextricably intertwined with investments in food and agricultural research and development (RD (2) the shifting public shares reflect a continuing decline in the rate of growth of food and agricultural RD (3) in PPP terms, China now spends more than the United States on both public- and private-sector food and agricultural RD (4) the global share of food and agricultural RD and (5) the low-income countries are losing ground and account for an exceptionally small share of global spending. The mean and median values of the reported rates of return to food and agricultural R&D based on the IRR are high and remain so, with no signs of a diminution in the payoffs to more recent (compared with earlier) investments in R&D. But the available evidence on the returns to food and agricultural R&D is not fully representative of the institutional (i.e., public versus private), locational, or commodity orientation of the research and the agricultural sector itself.