International Agricultural Productivity Growth Workshop

An agenda is available.

Monitoring and improving agricultural productivity is critical for enhancing rural economic growth and national competitiveness. Other large agricultural commodity producers besides the United States have attempted various policy reforms to enhance public and private agricultural research and innovation that improves productivity. The papers in this workshop present economic policy lessons from those experiences as well as new and improved estimates of agricultural productivity in these countries.

Topics addressed in the papers begin with the latest refinements in productivity measurement for the United States and Canada with institutional factors that have influenced the productivity level. The second set of papers address the same questions for Holland and the United Kingdom, followed by the developing-country experiences of large producers. Collectively these papers address a host of questions:

• Does research privatization, trade liberalization or globalization and out-sourcing increase productivity (and for whom)? 
• For developing countries that have experienced the fastest growth in productivity, what factors seem to have facilitated that growth? 
• What impediments have stood in the way for those countries with lagging productivity?