Global economic growth and agricultural land conversion under uncertain productivity improvements in agriculture

Bruno Lanz, Simon Dietz and Timothy Swanson

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We study how stochasticity in the evolution of agricultural productivity interacts with economic and population growth at the global level. We use a two-sector Schumpeterian model of growth, in which a manufacturing sector produces the traditional consumption good and an agricultural sector produces food to sustain contemporaneous population. Agriculture demands land as an input, itself treated as a scarce form of capital. In our model both population and sectoral technological progress are endogenously determined, and key technological parameters of the model are structurally estimated using 1960-2010 data on world GDP, population, cropland and technological progress. Introducing random shocks to the evolution of total factor productivity in agriculture, we show that uncertainty optimally requires more land to be converted into agricultural use as a hedge against production shortages, and that it significantly affects both optimal consumption and population trajectories.

Keywords: agricultural productivity; economic growth; endogenous innovations; environmental constraints; food security; global population; land conversion; stochastic control (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 J11 O11 O13 O31 Q16 Q24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-03-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev, nep-eff and nep-ore
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 1, March, 2018, 100(2), pp. 545-569. ISSN: 0002-9092

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/85638/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Global Economic Growth and Agricultural Land Conversion under Uncertain Productivity Improvements in Agriculture (2018)
Working Paper: Global economic growth and agricultural land conversion under uncertain productivity improvements in agriculture (2017)
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:ehl:lserod:85638

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().