Agricultural trade and industrial development

Angus Chu, Yuichi Furukawa, Pietro Peretto and Rongxin Xu

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Is agricultural productivity conducive to economic development? We develop a two-country open-economy Schumpeterian growth model with endogenous takeoff. With agricultural trade and a subsistence requirement, higher domestic agricultural productivity has ambiguous effects on the economy's takeoff and its transitional growth rate if domestic and imported agricultural goods are substitutes. Without the subsistence requirement, higher domestic agricultural productivity delays industrialization and lowers transitional growth by increasing domestic demand for agricultural labor. This specialization force works in the opposite direction of the change in domestic consumption pattern governed by the subsistence requirement, which tends to release labor from agriculture. Without agricultural trade, the specialization force is absent and the subsistence requirement on agricultural consumption implies that higher domestic agricultural productivity reallocates labor from agriculture to industry, hastening industrialization and raising transitional growth. Using cross-country panel-data, we find that agricultural productivity has a direct positive effect on economic growth but this positive effect weakens and even becomes negative when reliance on agricultural imports is sufficiently high. Simulating the calibrated model, we find that improvement in domestic agricultural productivity accounts for about one-third of the changes in TFP growth in China and Japan, respectively, and more so for their main trading partner, the US.

Keywords: international trade; agricultural productivity; innovation; endogenous takeoff (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F43 O3 O4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-eff, nep-gro, nep-int, nep-inv and nep-opm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/122630/1/MPRA_paper_122630.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:122630

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 ().