This paper provides an overview of the various channels through which public infrastructure may affect growth. In addition to the conventional productivity, complementarity, and crowding-out effects typically emphasized in the literature, the impact of infrastructure on investment adjustment costs, the durability of private capital, and the production of health and education services are also highlighted. Effects on health and education are well documented in a number of microeconomic studies, but macroeconomists have only recently begun to study their implications for growth. Links between health, infrastructure, and growth are illustrated in an endogenous growth model with transitional dynamics, and the optimal allocation of public expenditure is discussed. The concluding section draws implications of the analysis for the design of strategies aimed at promoting growth and reducing poverty.

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Public infrastructure and growth : new channels and policy implications

Is small beautiful? Farm size, productivity, and poverty in Asian agriculture

Groundwater quality in the alluvial aquifer system of northwest India: New evidence of the extent of anthropogenic and geogenic contamination.

I would like to argue in this article that in the process of economic development in land-poor countries in Asia, agriculture faces three distinctly different problems: food insecurity, sectoral income inequality, and the declining food self-sufficiency associated with the declining comparative advantage in agriculture at the high-income stage. Massive imports of food grains to Asia, if they occur, will aggravate the world food shortage, which will have significant implications for the poverty incidence in the world. I argue that in order to avoid such a tragedy, Asia should expand farm size to reduce labor cost by adopting large-scale mechanization, sub-Saharan Africa should realize a green revolution in grain production, and Latin America should further expand its grain production capacity.

Presidential Address at 27th International Conference of Agricultural Economists, Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil : Food Insecurity, Income Inequality, and the Changing Comparative Advantage in World Agriculture

This study applies the Fare–Primont index to calculate total factor productivity (TFP) indices for agriculture in 17 regions of Bangladesh covering a 61-year period (1948–2008). It decomposes the TFP index into six finer components (technical change, technical-, scale- and mix-efficiency changes, residual scale- and residual mix-efficiency changes). Results reveal that TFP grew at an average rate of 0.57% p.a. led by the Chittagong, Rajshahi, Rangpur, Dinajpur and Noakhali regions. TFP growth is largely powered by technological progress estimated at 0.74% p.a. Technical efficiency improvement is negligible (0.01% p.a.) due to stagnant efficiency in most of the regions. Decline in scale efficiency is also negligible (0.01% p.a.), but the decline in mix efficiency is high at 0.19% p.a. Decomposition of the components of TFP changes into finer measures of efficiency corrects the existing literature’s blame of a decline in technical efficiency as the main cause of poor TFP growth in Bangladesh. Among the sources, farm size, R&D investment, extension expenditure and crop specialisation positively influenced TFP growth, whereas the literacy rate had a negative influence on growth. Policy implications include encouraging investment in R&D and extension, land reform measures to increase average farm size, promotion of Green Revolution technology and crop diversification.

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Six decades of total factor productivity change and sources of growth in Bangladesh agriculture (1948–2008)

Productivity growth in Indian agriculture: is there evidence of convergence across states?

Public infrastructure and productivity growth in Philippine agriculture, 1974–2000

This paper analyzes the factor relations of postwar Japanese agriculture to identify the factors which explain a significant decline in labor in the agricultural sector. A nonhomothetic and Hicks-non-neutral translog cost function is estimated. The results of the decomposition analysis based on the estimates show that biased technical changes and nonhomotheticity together with price-induced factor substitutions play an important role in easing the transfer of agricultural labor to the nonagricultural sectors. The results also suggest that the biased technical change is consistent with the Hicksian-induced innovation hypothesis.

Yoshimi Kuroda

Papers

Productivity growth in Indian agriculture: is there evidence of convergence across states?

Public infrastructure and productivity growth in Philippine agriculture, 1974–2000

The Production Structure and Demand for Labor in Postwar Japanese Agriculture, 1952–82

Labor productivity measurement in Japanese agriculture, 1956–1990☆

Research and extension expenditures and productivity in Japanese agriculture, 1960–1990