The food problem and the evolution of international income levels

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. This paper examines the effect of agricultural development on a country's overall development and growth experience. In most poor countries, large fractions of land, labor, and other productive resources are devoted to producing food for subsistence needs. This "food problem" can delay a country's industrial development for a long period of time, causing its per capita income to fall far behind the world leader. Once industrialization begins, this trend is reversed. The extent to which a country catches up to the leader depends primarily on factors that affect productivity in non-agricultural activities: agricultural productivity is thus largely irrelevant in the very long run. Terms of use: Documents inBut in the short run, a country that experiences large improvements in agricultural productivity (due to, say, a Green Revolution) will experience a rapid increase in its income relative to the leaders.

Growth and Structural Transformation

“…This leads to less labor, and capital, in non-agriculture, and hence to less aggregate output. Given the observed differences in the share of labor that is allocated to agriculture, Gollin et al (2002) show that this mechanism can account for a large part of the cross-country differences in aggregate output. This is interesting because in their model the only difference across countries is the level of productivity of agriculture.…”

“…Work by Gollin, Parente, andRogerson (2002, 2007) illustrates how low agricultural productivity can be the source of large cross-country differences in aggregate productivity. For ease of exposition we focus on the simpler presentation in the 2002 paper, which uses a twosector version of our benchmark model, with the two sectors being agriculture and non-agriculture.…”

“…More recently, it has taken a central state in the writing of non-economists such as Diamond (1997). 46 Laitner (2000) considers a similar framework as Gollin et al (2002) but focuses on a differ- 45 Chang and Hornstein (2011) make a related point about Korea. They show that two modifications of the onesector growth model are essential to account for the long-lived transition dynamics since 1960 during which Korea continued to accumulate capital.…”

On the role of policy interventions in structural change and economic development: The case of postwar Japan

“…However, we find that the overall impact of such policy changes is not significantly different from the results shown in Figure 4 (a)-(f). 10 The results of this counterfactual policy experiment may be seen as surprising, since they seem to contradict many existing studies which point to the existence of serious inefficiencies in the Japanese economy generated by agricultural protection policies (Hayami and Godo, 2002) and the significance of industrial policies during the rapid growth era (Johnson, 1982;Kosai and Kaminski, 1986). As for the industrial policy, some researchers have argued that the mode in which the government intervened in Japan was through dialogue, persuasion, and signaling, since government-directed credits through FILP were less than ten percent of total loans made to the industrial sector 10 These results are available from the authors upon request.…”

Neoclassical growth and the natural resource curse puzzle

“…3 These mechanisms are exploited by other papers such as Galor and Weil (2000), Caselli and Coleman (2001), Kögel and Prskawetz (2001), Hansen and Prescott (2002), Irz and Roe (2005), Gollin et al (2007), Restuccia et al (2008) and Strulik and Weisdorf (2008) to show how agriculture a¤ects poses a third mechanism that generates resource reallocations, di¤erences in input elasticities across sectors, and shows that it can be potentially important.…”