R&D Investments, technology spillovers and agricultural productivity, case of the Czech Republic

Abstract

Th e objective of the paper is to quantify the eff ect of the R&D investments on agricultural productivity in the Czech Republic using the co-integration analysis. Th e eff ect of the R&D investments is measured by a knowledge stock constructed using a gamma distribution with lags ranging from 7 to 15 years. Th e relationship between the total factor productivity in agriculture, the domestic knowledge stock and the foreign R&D spillovers approximated by the imports of agricultural technologies is examined using an error correction model. Whereas the estimates confi rm that domestic research plays a positive role in agricultural productivity, the results for the foreign R&D spillovers are rather weak. Furthermore, there is little evidence that either length of time or the functional form of weights plays a major role in assessing the dependence of the productivity on R&D investments; however, the models with the knowledge distribution lags longer than 7 years perform better.

The impact of public research expenditure on agricultural productivity: evidence from developed European countries

“…Since the latest studies on USA consider a period starting from the 1950s and ending no later than 2011, while our period of analysis is from 1970 to 2016, this difference may be explained by a reduction of the adoption lag in the last one or two decades. Our results are only partially comparable with the ones from studies focused on specific European countries due to several reasons: a much shorter lag length is assumed (Ratinger & Kristkova, 2015;Guesmi & Gil, 2017); the lag distribution is imposed rather than estimated (Lemarié et al, 2020); the considered period is outdated (Thirtle et al, 2008).…”

“…United States of America (USA) and developed European countries have been leaders in science-based agricultural productivity increase since the middle of the 20th century, motivating hundreds of quantitative studies aimed at assessing the impact of public research expenditure on agricultural productivity and the corresponding economic return. However, the almost totality of these studies has focused on USA (see Fuglie et al, 2017;Baldos et al, 2018;Andersen, 2019 for a review), with few scattered contributes on European countries (Thirtle et al, 2008;Ratinger & Kristkova, 2015;Guesmi & Gil, 2017;Lemarié et al, 2020).…”

Exploring firm-level and sectoral variation in total factor productivity (TFP)

“…To date, most studies on productivity have only dealt with selected sectors such as agriculture (e.g. Cechura, 2012;Ratinger and Kristkova, 2015;Zenka et al, 2015), manufacturing (e.g. Baghdasaryan and La Cour, 2013) and the banking sector (e.g.…”

Agricultural science research impact in the Eastern European Union Member States

“…This neglect partly refl ects the adverse bias noted in the introduction to this article, but there is a deeper concern with respect to the structural break involved in the transition from centrally-planned to market economies that began early in the 1990s. As Ratinger and Kristkova (2015) observe, in common with other formerly centrally-planned economies, the Czech Republic experienced a severe reduction in agricultural output, infl ows of foreign capital and technology, and restructuring of land ownership in the years following 1989. Their approach involved using employment data as a proxy for expenditure prior to transition and correcting for the shakeout of non-scientifi c personnel working in research prior to transition.…”

“…Five studies in individual European countries of this type can be identifi ed: for Italy, Esposti and Pierani (2003); for the United Kingdom, Thirtle et al (2004), Piesse and Thirtle (2010); and for France,Butault 2 Technically, the IRR is the rate of interest that "when used to discount all cash fl ows resulting from an investment, will equate the present value of the cash receipts to the present value of the cash outlays" (Drury, 2008, p.298). et al (2015); the report of Ratinger and Kristkova (2015) on the Czech Republic is the sole national study from the Eastern EU. These estimate national internal rates of return to be between 14 and 32 per cent.…”