Green Revolutions and Miracle Economies: Agricultural Innovation, Trade and Growth
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 risi...
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| Format: | text |
| Language: | English |
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Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University
2005
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| Online Access: | https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/863 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soe_research/article/1862/viewcontent/greenrev.pdf |
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| Institution: | Singapore Management University |
| Language: | English |
| Summary: | 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. |
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