Premium
India's post‐green‐revolution agricultural performance: what is driving growth?
Author(s) -
Rada Nicholas
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
agricultural economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.29
H-Index - 82
eISSN - 1574-0862
pISSN - 0169-5150
DOI - 10.1111/agec.12234
Subject(s) - diversification (marketing strategy) , agriculture , economics , green revolution , total factor productivity , agricultural economics , agricultural productivity , productivity , cropping , yield (engineering) , growth accounting , production (economics) , technological change , product (mathematics) , economic geography , economic growth , business , geography , macroeconomics , geometry , materials science , archaeology , mathematics , marketing , metallurgy
Following a period of poor performance in the 1990s, India's agricultural growth rate has reaccelerated in the 2000s. Some believe the reacceleration has been a product of intensified investment, which in turn has spurred yield growth. Others suggest it is because India's newly wealthy citizens have demanded greater product diversification. To examine these hypotheses, we use growth accounting techniques in conjunction with more complete agricultural production data than in past studies to construct state, regional, and national output, input, and total factor productivity quantity indexes, which can be decomposed into their underlying sources. Sectoral performance evaluation suggests that, since 1980, output growth has diffused away from the northern “grain belt” and toward high‐value agriculture in traditionally less‐productive regions. Productivity growth, rather than resource use, has accounted for these geographical and intensity shifts. The growth burst has not, as the literature has primarily argued, been uniquely explainable by yield growth or product diversification but by a variety of factors, including area expansion. For example, the contributions of irrigation technologies permitting double‐cropping have until now been largely ignored.