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Technology, production environment, and household income: Assessing the regional impacts of technological change
Author(s) -
Renkow Mitch
Publication year - 1994
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/j.1574-0862.1994.tb00304.x
Subject(s) - economics , commodity , technological change , production (economics) , economic interventionism , welfare , agriculture , early adopter , work (physics) , open economy , technical change , labour economics , business , monetary economics , microeconomics , market economy , macroeconomics , exchange rate , productivity , mechanical engineering , ecology , marketing , politics , biology , political science , law , engineering
This paper clarifies the factors determining the welfare effects of improved agricultural technologies when technology diffusion is unevenly distributed across production environments Household‐level income effects are shown to depend primarily on: (a) whether the economy is open or closed with respect to world markets; (b) whether households are net consumers or net producers of the commodity for which technological change occurs; (c) whether households are adopters or non‐adopters of the new technology; (d) the degree to which labor is mobile across agricultural regions; and (e) government intervention in commodity and/or factor markets. A review of recent empirical work indicates considerable variation in the relative strength of these various factors across countries, and that assumptions regarding the mechanism by which commodity prices are determined – endogenously as in a closed economy, or exogenously as in an open economy – is especially critical.