Agricultural Productivity and Income Divergence: Evidence from the Green Revolution

Kaixing Huang ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Developing countries sharing nearly identical growth trends for centuries dramatically diverged in terms of income per capita over the last half-century. Using data from 78 developing countries, this study shows that the Green Revolution (GR) since the 1960s can explain most of the income divergence. Beyond the understanding that agriculture growth promotes economic growth, the study shows that developing countries less suitable for cultivating GR crops were substantially damaged by GR-induced grain imports, which increased fertility and retarded human and physical capital formation. A counterfactual analysis removing GR’s effect showed parallel growth trends similar to that prior to the GR.

Keywords: The Green Revolution; international trade; income divergence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E0 Q1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-05-17, Revised 2021-06-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev, nep-env, nep-gro and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/108357/1/MPRA_paper_108357.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:108357

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().