An examination of international agricultural productivity, technological bias, and efficiency gains

The purpose of this study is to measure and compare agricultural productivity among countries over the 1961--2001 periods. This study also examines trends in productivity and factors affecting productivity.; Data were collected from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Development Indicators (WDI), and the Penn World Tables (PWT). The analysis proceeded in two stages. In the first stage, a nonparametric data envelopment analysis was used to estimate the world frontiers and the results were used to calculate total factor productivity, efficiency change, and technical change. Efficiency change was decomposed into pure technical efficiency change and scale change. Technical change was decomposed into input bias and a magnitude component. The second stage contains regressions that relate productivity estimates to input-output ratios, input ratios, economic characteristics of countries as well as a time variable to explore trends and convergence.; Study results show that agricultural productivity growth averaged -0.36%, 1.87%, -0.94% per year for the world, developed countries and developing countries, respectively. The productivity growth for the regions of Africa, Asia, North and Central America, South America, and Oceania averaged -0.84%, -1.98%, -0.01%, -0.76%, and -1.25%, respectively. In contrast, productivity growth for Europe averaged 2.44%. The green and the non-green revolution countries had an average productivity growth of -1.36% and -1.07%, respectively. The developing countries derived improvements in productivity primarily from efficiency change while the developed countries derived improvements primarily from technical change. With the exception of Europe and North and Central America, the negative productivity growth recorded above was due largely to declining technical progress.; Findings from the regressions showed that the labor-output ratio was negatively related to productivity for the developed and green revolution countries, the capital-output ratio was positively related to productivity for the developing countries, and the fertilizer-output ratio was positively related to productivity for the green revolution countries. Overall, technical change was biased towards non-traditional inputs, especially fertilizer.; For the estimation of the relationship between productivity and economic characteristics, findings indicated that personal consumption was negatively related to productivity, but openness to trade and intensity of infrastructural facilities were positively related to productivity. The test results suggested that productivity is converging only for developed countries, while scale and overall efficiency changes are converging only for Asian countries.