Feeding The World

In the last two centuries, agriculture has been an outstanding, if somewhat neglected, success story. Agriculture has fed an ever-growing population with an increasing variety of products at falling prices, even as it has released a growing number of workers to the rest of the economy. This book, a comprehensive history of world agriculture during this period, explains how these feats were accomplished.Feeding the Worldsynthesizes two hundred years of agricultural development throughout the world, providing all essential data and extensive references to the literature. It covers, systematically, all the factors that have affected agricultural performance: environment, accumulation of inputs, technical progress, institutional change, commercialization, agricultural policies, and more. The last chapter discusses the contribution of agriculture to modern economic growth. The book is global in its reach and analysis, and represents a grand synthesis of an enormous topic.

Giovanni Federico is professor of economic history at the European University Institute

List of Illustrations	p. ix
List of Tables	p. ix
Preface	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
Why Is Agriculture Different?	p. 5
Introduction	p. 5
Agriculture and the Environment: An Uneasy Relationship	p. 5
Factor Endowment and the Characteristics of Agriculture	p. 13
Trends in the Long Run	p. 16
Introduction	p. 16
Output	p. 16
Prices	p. 21
The Composition of Agricultural Output	p. 26
Trade	p. 28
Patterns of Growth: The Inputs	p. 31
Introduction	p. 31
Land	p. 31
Capital	p. 40
Labor	p. 56
Conclusion: Factor Endowment and Factor Prices in the Long Run	p. 64
The Causes of Growth: The Increase in Productivity	p. 69
Introduction	p. 69
The Productivity of Land and Labor	p. 70
The Total Factor Productivity	p. 74
Conclusion: On the Interpretation of Total Factor Productivity Growth	p. 82
Technical Progress in Agriculture	p. 83
Introduction: Productivity Growth and Technical Progress	p. 83
The Major Innovations	p. 84
The Macroeconomics of Innovations: Factor Prices and Technical Progress	p. 93
The Microeconomics of Agricultural Innovation: Appropriability, Complementarity, Environment, and Risk	p. 101
The Microeconomics of Agricultural Innovation: Research Institutions and Technical Progress	p. 105
Conclusion: On the Causes of Technical Progress	p. 114
The Microeconomics of Agricultural Institutions	p. 117
Introduction: What Are the Institutions, and Why Should We Care about Them?	p. 117
Property Rights	p. 118
The "Structure": Matching Land and Labor	p. 121
Finding the Money: Formal and Informal Credit	p. 128
The Co-operative: The Best of All Possible Worlds?	p. 133
Conclusion: Is There an "Ideal" Farm?	p. 136
Agricultural Institutions and Growth	p. 143
Introduction	p. 143
Prelude: The Establishing of Modern Property Rights	p. 144
Meddling with Property Rights: Land Reform and Other Structural Interventions	p. 149
The "Structural" Change in the Long Run	p. 152
The Development of Markets	p. 160
Self-help: The Growth of the Co-operative Movement	p. 168
Institutions and Agricultural Growth: The Creation of Property Rights and "Structural" Interventions	p. 172
Institutions and Agricultural Growth: Landownership, Farm Size, and Contracts	p. 177
Institutions and Agricultural Growth: The Development of Markets	p. 181
Conclusion: Did Institutions Really Matter?	p. 186
The State and the Market	p. 187
Introduction: On the Design of Agricultural Policies	p. 187
Before 1914: The Era of Laissez Faire	p. 189
The Interwar Years: The Great Discontinuity	p. 191
The OECD Countries after 1945: The Era of Surpluses	p. 196
The Less Developed Countries after Independence: The Green Revolution and the "Development" Policies	p. 201
The Socialist Countries	p. 205
On the Effects of Agricultural Policies	p. 211
Conclusion: The Political Economy of Agricultural Policies	p. 215
Conclusions: Agriculture and Economic Growth in the Long Run	p. 221
Fifteen Stylized Facts	p. 221
Agriculture and Economic Growth: Some Theory	p. 222
Agriculture and Economic Growth: Debates and Historical Evidence	p. 226
Concluding Remarks: A Look to the Future	p. 231
Statistical Appendix	p. 233
Notes	p. 251
Bibliography	p. 325
Index	p. 381
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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