Empirical Analysis of Soviet Agricultural Production and Policy

Abstract

This paper employs production function analysis to examine a number of pivotal issues concerning the Soviet agricultural sector. Estimates of three input translog production functions for five agricultural commodities grown in the Soviet Union from 1960–76 are reported. These results are used to draw inferences on such matters as the rationality of Soviet agricultural factor pricing, the nature of agricultural returns to scale in the USSR, and the scope of factor substitution in that country. The empirical evidence suggests that Soviet decisions in the sphere of agricultural production, contrary to the conventional wisdom, are well‐founded technologically.

Productivity growth in pre-1990 Mongolian agriculture: spiralling disaster or emerging success?

“…Note that the sown area is used as the land measure (as opposed to total crop land) because the ratios of cultivated land to fallow land differed between the crop regions depending on their long-term rainfall levels and soil qualities, which determine the fallow required. Since this ratio was kept constant for each farm over time, sown area was seen as the best measure of land input (see, for example, Wyzan, 1981;Koopman, 1989).…”

Three essays on productivity in post-Soviet primary agriculture

“…At the same time, our land elasticity is close to the value 0.71 found by Johnson et al(1994) for Ukraine, who used a different model and relied on farm-level data in rubles for several inputs for the years 1986-1991. Wyzan (1981) found the land elasticity to be 0.62 when estimating a grain production function for the whole USSR with republic-level aggregated data for 1960-1976.…”