Green Revolutions and Miracle Economies: Agricultural Innovation, Trade and Growth

Brishti Guha ()

No 20-2005, Working Papers from Singapore Management University, School of Economics

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to develop a simple model of an economy in which growth is driven by a combination of exogenous technical change in agriculture as well as by a rising world demand for labor-intensive manufactured exports. We explore the relative roles of agricultural innovation and rising export demand in a model with two traded industrial goods and a non-traded agricultural good, food. When the non-traded sector uses a specific factor, we show that technical change in agriculture may be the key to sustained factor accumulation in industry, in particular driving intersectoral labor migration. A key assumption is a less than unitary price elasticity of demand for food. Our results could form a crucial link in capturing the story of labor-abundant economies which experienced structural transformation and growth through labor-intensive manufactured exports, without prior technology breakthroughs in industry. They contribute to explaining the massive growth in factor accumulation which shows up in some growth accounting studies : they may also imply that some of the contribution of “technical progress” is mistakenly attributed solely to factor accumulation.

Keywords: Structural change; agricultural productivity; labor migration; terms of trade. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F1 O3 O4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2005-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-ino, nep-int and nep-sea
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Published in SMU Economics and Statistics Working Paper Series

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Related works:
Journal Article: Green revolutions and miracle economies: Agricultural innovations, trade and growth (2006)
Working Paper: Green Revolutions and Miracle Economies: Agricultural Innovation, Trade and Growth (2005)
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