ABSTRACT It is well accepted that biological innovations, particularly varietal improvements, have greatly contributed to agricultural yield and output growth in the past. At the same time, public funding for breeding programmes such as at the Agricultural Research Council in South Africa has dwindled. In an effort to confirm the importance of continued funding of varietal improvement programmes, this paper estimates the benefits from wheat varietal innovations and attributes them to the different institutional sources (public, private and others) that have contributed to varietal changes in South Africa. The empirical analyses used data on market shares of wheat varieties planted by farmers and annual quantities of wheat produced across different wheat-production areas in South Africa (summer dryland, dryland winter, and irrigation). A vintage regression model was estimated to calculate the proportional yield gain from wheat varietal improvements. The results indicated that the rate of gain in yield as a result of releases of new wheat varieties (variety research) was 0.8 per cent per year (equivalent to 19.84 kg/ha/year) for dryland summer varieties, and 0.5 per cent for both irrigation (equivalent to 32.20 kg/ha/year) and dryland winter varieties (equivalent to 16.65 kg/ha/year). The attribution of benefits among different institutional sources confirms that not accounting for attribution of benefits by source and time period results is overestimation of benefits to any specific research programme. Attribution of benefits by institutional source showed that Sensako dominated, while the share of the ARC-SGI substantially declined, after deregulation of the wheat sub-sector. The results highlight the impact of the decline in public funding for wheat variety improvement research after deregulation and provide a strong argument for continued public funding for variety improvement in South Africa.

中文翻译：

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估计和归因于南非农业小麦品种创新的收益

摘要 众所周知，生物创新，特别是品种改良，在过去对农业产量和产量增长做出了巨大贡献。与此同时，南非农业研究委员会等育种计划的公共资金已经减少。为了确认继续资助品种改良计划的重要性，本文估计了小麦品种创新的收益，并将其归因于促成南非品种变化的不同机构来源（公共、私人和其他）。实证分析使用了农民种植的小麦品种的市场份额数据以及南非不同小麦产区（夏季旱地、冬季旱地和灌溉）的小麦年产量数据。估计一个老式回归模型来计算小麦品种改良的比例产量增加。结果表明，由于新小麦品种（品种研究）的释放，旱地夏季品种的产量增加率为每年 0.8%（相当于 19.84 公斤/公顷/年），两者均为 0.5%灌溉（相当于 32.20 公斤/公顷/年）和旱地冬季品种（相当于 16.65 公斤/公顷/年）。不同机构来源之间的收益归因证实，不考虑来源和时间段结果的收益归因是对任何特定研究计划的收益的高估。按机构来源划分的收益归属表明，在小麦子行业放松管制后，Sensako 占主导地位，而 ARC-SGI 的份额大幅下降。