Assessing the contribution of public investments in agriculture and research in agricultural production in Europe is the aim of the scientific publication recently accepted by our project partners Meri Raggi and Davide Viaggi; as well as a Michele Vollaro (University of Bologna, Italy)
To develop the journal article, they have taken into account two fundamental elements:
The first is found in a “literature review” on the connection between public investment, development (R&D) and agricultural productivity.
In a second place the “Availability and Selection of data“, which summarizes spending on agricultural R&D and agricultural productivity measures.
Methodology
The methodology proposed by the researchers begins by arguing the lack of a common established and consensus in the methodologies that study the impact of agricultural R&D on the economy; of which they make a magnificent review of the various approaches of the authors or of the various geographical regions (as is the case of Europe and the United States).
For the research, they analysed the impact of public R&D on agricultural productivity at the aggregate level, using data from 16 representative countries. With these data, the RoR (agricultural productivity and rates of return) of public spending on research in Europe was estimated.
Likewise, the authors emphasize the cost-benefit analysis as an effective methodology to evaluate the economic impact on the computation of R&D investments.
Results
Obviously, we will not show the results of the research in this post, although we will make some clarifications.
Southern European countries support the hypothesis that agricultural research is more adaptive rather than basic, and expect research on this topic to be shorter than the suggested 50 years.
The results have shown positive and negative effects; as well as the need to include more variables that could affect agricultural productivity, such as climate, meteorological anomalies, private investment in research, etc.
However, the results corroborate the hypothesis that research spending has a generally positive impact on productivity.
