Developing countries, such as China and Brazil, lead global productivity growth

Raising the productivity of existing agricultural resources—rather than bringing new resources into production—has become the major source of growth in world agriculture. The total productivity of agricultural inputs, or TFP (total factor productivity), has been rising steadily in most industrialized countries at between 1 and 2 percent a year since at least the 1970s. Among developing countries and transition economies of the former Soviet bloc, agricultural TFP growth rates have been much more uneven. Some developing countries have had agricultural TFP growth rates of over 2 percent per year since the 1970s, while other countries (especially in Sub-Saharan Africa) have seen little productivity growth at all. For the developing countries that were able to accelerate agricultural TFP growth rates, key factors have been market reforms and greater capacity of national agricultural research and extension systems. Long-term investments in agricultural research were especially important to sustaining higher productivity growth rates in large, rapidly developing countries such as Brazil and India. Chinese agriculture benefited enormously from institutional and market reforms as well as from technological changes made possible by investments in research. Following the economic transition from a planned to a market economy in the early 1990s, Russian agriculture rebounded because of substantial productivity growth in the southern region of the country. Under-investment in agricultural research remains an important barrier to stimulating agricultural productivity growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. This chart appears in the ERS data product for International Agricultural Productivity, updated October 2018.

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