Public R&D Meets Economic Development: Embrapa and Brazil’s Agricultural Revolution

Ariel Akerman, Jacob Moscona, Heitor Pellegrina () and Karthik Sastry

No 34213, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Can public R&D in developing countries raise productivity? We study how Brazil’s Embrapa—a public research corporation founded in 1973 to develop locally-relevant agricultural technologies—shaped agricultural development. Researcher-level micro-data reveal that Embrapa shifted innovation toward staple crops and Brazil-specific ecology, with no decline in researcher productivity. Exploiting Embrapa’s staggered expansion alongside municipality-level variation in the ecological suitability of Em-brapa’s innovation, we find significant increases in agricultural productivity, concen-trated in targeted staple crops. Our estimates imply that Embrapa raised aggregate agricultural productivity by 110% with a benefit–cost ratio of 17, driven by the appli-cability of Embrapa’s innovation across Brazil.

JEL-codes: O13 O25 O3 O38 O4 O54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev and nep-eff
Note: DEV EEE EFG PR
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