Agricultural Research: Benefits and Beneficiaries of Alternative Funding Mechanism
Wallace Huffman and
Richard Just
ISU General Staff Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics
Abstract:
The United States has developed a very successful R&D system for agriculture. It is a system with shared cost/financing and performance by the federal and state governments and by the private sector. The paper presents an economic analysis of alternative organization, management, incentive, and funding mechanisms for agricultural research under budget constraints, including some emphasis on thekinds of benefits thatare generated and thegroups that receive them. We conclude that the private sector should bepermitted to carry outresearch that it finds profitable to undertake withminimal competition firom the public sector. The public research institutions should focus on general and pretechnology science programs that complement private R&D activities and conduct applied research in areas where innovations are socially beneficial but notprivately profitable. The mechanism for channeling public funds to researchers, e.g., formula, competitive grants, or ear-marks can be expected to affect the types of benefits/impacts of agricultural research conducted and the efficiency of the research activity. Themanagement of research is difficult because of the large amount of uncertainty associated with innovations and contracting problems.
Date: 1997-12-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)
Downloads: (external link)
https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/server/api/core/bitstre ... 49f2c7cbbcfc/content
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden
Related works:
Journal Article: Agricultural Research: Benefits and Beneficiaries of Alternative Funding Mechanisms (1999) 
Working Paper: Agricultural Research: Benefits and Beneficiaries of Alternative Funding Mechanisms (1999)
Working Paper: Agricultural Research: Benefits and Beneficiaries of Alternative Funding Mechanisms (1999) 
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:isu:genstf:199712010800001291
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in ISU General Staff Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics Iowa State University, Dept. of Economics, 260 Heady Hall, Ames, IA 50011-1070. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Curtis Balmer ().