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Sources of Increased Instability in Indian and U.S. Cereal Production
Author(s) -
Hazell Peter B. R.
Publication year - 1984
Publication title -
american journal of agricultural economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.949
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1467-8276
pISSN - 0002-9092
DOI - 10.2307/1240797
Subject(s) - production (economics) , crop , covariate , yield (engineering) , variance (accounting) , crop production , instability , variable (mathematics) , variance decomposition of forecast errors , decomposition , standard deviation , economics , agronomy , mathematics , econometrics , statistics , biology , agriculture , ecology , physics , mathematical analysis , macroeconomics , accounting , mechanics , thermodynamics
Recent growth in Indian and U.S. cereal production has been accompanied by a more than proportional increase in the standard deviation of production. This study applies variance decomposition procedures to state data on crop production to analyze the sources of this increased instability. It is found that production has become significantly more covariate between states and crops, largely because of increased yield variability and a loss in offsetting patterns of variation between crop yields in different states. These changes may be associated with more variable prices, with higher‐yielding technologies, and with a narrowing of the genetic base.