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International Diffusion of Agrarian Technology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Robert Evenson
Robert Evenson
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

Improved techniques of production have been an important part of the history of agricultural change in all modern economies. The search for policies to bring about the rapid introduction of improved techniques of production in traditional or less developed agricultural sectors has been a central focus of development agencies for the past two decades. It has proven to be a very difficult task, however, to develop policies which actually achieve the transfer of new techniques. The record of success in development efforts towards this end in agriculture has been, on the whole, rather poor.

Type
Papers Presented at the Thirty-third Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , March 1974 , pp. 51 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1974

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References

1 Optimality would require that the expected cost reduction from technology discovery in each station be equalized. There is a specific number of research stations and sub-stations that will be optimal, given scale economies in stations and diminishing returns to discovery in each station.

2 A brief review of direct diffusion is undertaken in Part II.

3 See Kislev and Evenson, “Investment” for a survey of national systems.

4 Bovell in 1900, pursued a breeding program of “selfing,” i.e., inbreeding to identify the characteristics of progeny of specific varieties to determine their value as breeding stock. It was shortly after this that Shull and East in the U.S. used the same principal to develop the “hybridization” of corn. (See Stevenson, 1968, in Appendix ).

5 The sub-regions are the adjusted number of countries in the region: see the notes to Table 3.

6 Actually a time lag is built into this construction. In the a1, rise lin-early from 0 at t to 1 at t-7.