Agricultural R&D investment, knowledge stocks and productivity growth in Latin America and the Caribbean

Nin-Pratt, Alejandro; and Falconi, César A. 2018. Agricultural R&D investment, knowledge stocks and productivity growth in Latin America and the Caribbean. IFPRI Discussion Paper 1730. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). https://hdl.handle.net/10568/147342

Between 2001 and 2012, Latin America and the Caribbean’s (LAC) agriculture saw its best performance of the last 30 years. Given the importance of agricultural R&D investment to sustain agricultural growth in the future, this study looks at the state of agricultural R&D investment in LAC, and analyzes the role that this investment played in the performance of agriculture in recent years. This is done by developing a new approach for the estimation of knowledge stocks that allow us to obtain R&D elasticities and measures of return to R&D investment that avoid some of the major problems encountered in the literature that uses econometric methods.