Search Results

This chapter systematically addresses how rural infrastructure development can impact agricultural output using a large canvas of literature and district-wise data. Though a number of empirical studies have established the nexus between the infrastructure development and agricultural growth, not many studies are available using large number of districts and covering different time-points in recent time in the Indian context. Despite the fact that the infrastructure development cannot make impact instantaneously on agricultural output, most available studies have analysed the impact of infrastructure factors on the agricultural output without using them as lagged variables. While addressing the impact of infrastructure factors on agricultural output over time, this chapter brings out the real nexus between infrastructure development and the agricultural output covering 256 districts using both descriptive and regression analyses.

This chapter provides an explanation as to whether agricultural market access has any relationship with farm income. A plethora of studies confirm that rural infrastructure is a sine qua non for significantly improving agricultural production. Recent literature indicates that in addition to factors like human capital, credit markets, extension services and technology, the presence of reliable infrastructures such as roads and market sites increase the efficiency of both marketing and production by bringing down the transaction costs and ensuring more competitive pricing conditions in marketing than would occur in their absence. Making a departure from earlier studies by taking 235 Indian districts as the unit of analysis, chapter 5 attempts to provide an empirical basis for the perceived nexus between market access, agriculture infrastructure and value of agriculture output (VAO) from the Indian perspective using regression analysis.

This chapter demonstrates the approach used by Vernon Ruttan and Yujiro Hayami in their study, which involves the estimation of a cross-country production function of the Cobb-Douglas type for thirty-eight developed and underdeveloped countries. In the estimation, the differences in agricultural output per worker are accounted for by variations in the level of conventional and non-conventional inputs per worker and classified as internal resource accumulation, technical inputs supplied by the non-agriculture sector, and human capital. The independent variables used in the study include labor, land, livestock, fertilizer, machinery, education, and technical manpower.

The chapter summarizes work conducted under the UK National Ecosystem Assessment and the ESRC SEER project. This synthesizes valuation studies of the effects of land-use change on agricultural output, greenhouse gases, open-access recreation, and urban greenspace. All effects are valued in economic terms and contrasted with an assessment of the costs of maintaining present levels of biodiversity. The valuation models are spatially explicit, revealing the effect that underlying variation in the natural environment has on mitigating or exacerbating effects. Various scenarios of change are appraised over an extended period of time. Results suggest that sole adherence to the maximization of market values can lead to net losses when other impacts are assessed. In contrast, changes which emphasize both market and non-market effects can yield substantially greater benefits for society.

This chapter explores the common basis for rapid growth in agricultural output and productivity that lies in the adaptation of agricultural technology to the contrasting factor proportions in Japan and the United States. It explains the important aspect of adaptation as the ability to generate a continuous sequence of induced innovations in agricultural technology that are subjective toward saving limiting factors. In Japan the innovations were biological and chemical, while in the United States the innovations were mechanical.

This chapter begins by outlining the characteristics of resource endowments, agrarian structures, growth in aggregate agricultural output, and changes in the shares of major export commodities in world markets in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand. This is followed by a review of the process of vent-for-surplus development in Southeast Asia from the late 19th to early 20th century, emphasizing the critical roles of major river deltas in the continental zone of Southeast Asia and tropical rain forests in the insular zone. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how governments forged policy choices in terms of the structure of political economy under unique ecological conditions and historical trajectories.

Demography includes not only fertility, mortality, and immigration, but also the racial and gender composition of the population, living arrangements, marriage, divorce, the timing of the entry and exit from the workforce and age-, gender-, and race-specific health and disability. Economic demography is a vast topic and just a tip of the iceberg is provided by discussing the important connections between the two fields. This book offers deeper analysis of a variety of issues such as the impact of greater wealth on choices about marriage and childbearing and the effects of aging populations on housing prices, Social Security, and Medicare.