The Macroeconomics of Intensive Agriculture

Timo Boppart, Patrick Kiernan, Per Krusell and Hannes Malmberg

No 18039, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Developing countries employ a very large share of their workforce in agriculture, a sector in which their labor productivity is particularly low. We take a macroeconomic approach to analyze the role of agriculture in development. We construct a new database with systematic measures of inputs and outputs of agricultural production around the globe. The data exhibits strong neoclassical features: going from poor to rich countries, capital and intermediate input prices decline dramatically relative to labor prices; concurrently, capital and intermediate input use in agriculture increases by a factor of 300–800 relative to labor. Input intensification accounts for a bit less than two-thirds of the agricultural labor productivity gap between the poorest and richest countries. Our observations are well explained by an aggregate agricultural production function with input substitutabilities significantly above unity. On the demand side, standard non-homothetic preferences accurately capture how the expenditure share of agricultural goods varies across the development spectrum. We incorporate our findings into a closed-economy general-equilibrium model with minimal distortions, showing that non-agricultural TFP differences play a much more important role than agricultural TFP differences in explaining income differences.

Keywords: Development; Macroeconomics; Agricultural productivity; Structural transformation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E13 O13 O41 O47 Q1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP18039 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: The Macroeconomics of Intensive Agriculture (2023)
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:cpr:ceprdp:18039

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP18039

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().