Author(s): Moutinho, Nuno Alexandre Meneses Bastos
Date: 2011
Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10216/7515
Origin: Repositório Aberto da Universidade do Porto
Subject(s): Porto
Author(s): Moutinho, Nuno Alexandre Meneses Bastos
Date: 2011
Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10216/7515
Origin: Repositório Aberto da Universidade do Porto
Subject(s): Porto
Recent evidence on agricultural productivity growth contradicts common and longstanding beliefs that productivity growth in the agriculture sector is lower than in the overall economy and faster in developed than in developing countries. Such contradiction brings new interest to the issue of measuring agricultural productivity growth and of investigating the extent to which agriculture is responsible for the rising cross-country disparities of income and productivity. First, we evaluate relevant empirical studies identifying the sources of labor productivity growth and the available methods for studying efficiency and productivity. Then, we investigate the role of agriculture in economic growth by using a panel data set for 45 countries and 26 years, for agriculture and for the overall economy. We estimate parametric and semiparametric production frontier models that incorporate heterogeneity across countries. Within each framework, we first determine cross-country distributions of labor productivity, both for the overall economy and for agriculture, and we look at how those distributions have changed over time; second, we try to shed some light on the causes of those changes by investigating the extent to which they are due to catch-up, technical change and factor accumulation. We find that TFP growth was stronger for agriculture than for the economy as a whole, both for developed and developing countries. Changes in the distribution of labor productivity were mainly caused by capital deepening in the overall economy and by TFP change in agriculture. In this sector, factor accumulation was negative in the developing countries and positive in the developed countries, but the TFP growth rates were higher in the former group of countries than in the latter. Therefore, our results suggest that if disinvestment in this sector had not occurred, agriculture could have been an important engine of per capita income growth for the developing countries.