Agricultural R&D investment, knowledge stocks and productivity growth in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

Between 2001 and 2012, Latin America and the Caribbean’s (LAC) agriculture saw its best performance of the last 30 years. Given the importance of agricultural R&D investment to sustain agricultural growth in the future, this study looks at the state of agricultural R&D investment in LAC, and analyzes the role that this investment played in the performance of agriculture in recent years. This is done by developing a new approach for the estimation of knowledge stocks that allow us to obtain R&D elasticities and measures of return to R&D investment that avoid some of the major problems encountered in the literature that uses econometric methods.