Evaluating the genetic progress of wheat in NSW, 1992-2009

Thomas Redmond, Elizabeth Nolan and Peter J. Martin

No 100702, 2011 Conference (55th), February 8-11, 2011, Melbourne, Australia from Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society

Abstract: Intellectual Property Regimes (IPRs) have been justified on the basis that they promote innovation, but it is not always clear that they do so. Empirical studies of IPRs in an Australian context have been limited. Plant variety protection is one form of IPR. The passing of the Australian Plant Breeder’s Rights Act of 1994 has been followed by significant commercialisation of the wheat breeding industry. The purpose of this paper is to consider whether this commercialisation has benefited wheat productivity through varietal improvement. We estimate a linear crop production function, using a random effects Hausman Taylor estimator to evaluate differences in genetic contributions to productivity between public and private wheat varieties commercially released in NSW over the period 1992-2009 using crop varietal data. Results from the Hausman Taylor estimator show that private varieties, on average, have outperformed public varieties over the period, suggesting that Plant Breeder’s Rights has promoted productive innovation in wheat. However, when we consider the best performing genetics of the varieties, public varieties have, in some years, outperformed privately bred varieties.

Keywords: Crop Production/Industries; Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-eff, nep-ipr and nep-pr~
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/100702/files/Redmond_AARES_2011.pdf (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:ags:aare11:100702

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.100702

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2011 Conference (55th), February 8-11, 2011, Melbourne, Australia from Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().