Russia's transition to a market economy in the early 1990s shocked its agricultural sector, creating the potential for profit and gains from specialisation and productivity improvements. However, subsequent regional agricultural development has been highly uneven, and the sources of the sector's productivity improvement remain unclear. Drawing on a newly‐assembled Russian regional farm production and policy dataset, we evaluate agricultural total factor productivity growth from 1994 to 2013, decomposing that growth into technical progress and efficiency gains, for the nation as a whole and for the major agricultural districts of the South and Central. We then test how investments in road and rail infrastructure and human capital have influenced those gains. The South substantially outperformed the Central district and the nation at large with respect to all three performance indicators. However, contrary to the literature, we find that these particular state policies provided no substantial growth advantages, there or elsewhere. Rather, the dominant force behind Russia's agricultural growth has been informal technical change.

中文翻译：

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评估俄罗斯的农业生产力和政策

俄罗斯在1990年代初期向市场经济过渡，震惊了其农业部门，从专业化和生产率提高中创造了获利和获利的潜力。但是，随后的区域农业发展高度不平衡，该部门生产率提高的来源仍不清楚。借助新组建的俄罗斯区域农业生产和政策数据集，我们评估了1994年至2013年农业全要素生产率的增长，并将该增长分解为技术进步和效率提升，涵盖了整个国家和整个主要农业地区南部和中部。然后，我们测试对公路和铁路基础设施以及人力资本的投资如何影响这些收益。就所有三个绩效指标而言，南方地区的表现大大优于中部地区和整个国家。但是，与文献相反，我们发现这些特殊的国家政策在当地或其他地方均未提供实质性的增长优势。相反，俄罗斯农业增长背后的主导力量是非正式的技术变革。