Abstract

This article argues that accounting for capital-embodied technology greatly increases the importance of capital in explaining cross-country differences in agricultural labor productivity. To do so, we draw on a novel data set of agricultural capital prices. We document that new capital is more expensive in richer countries, both in absolute terms and relative to old capital. A model of endogenous adoption of capital of different quality links these price differences to the path of capital-embodied technology. In particular, our model recovers the level of embodied technology from the price of new capital and the growth rate of embodied technology from the price of new capital relative to old capital. We then measure the stocks of quality-adjusted capital in agriculture for a sample of 16 countries at different stages of development. We find that adjusting for differences in quality almost doubles the importance of capital in accounting for cross-country differences in agricultural labor productivity: from 21% to 37%. In addition, improvements in capital quality have been an important source of agricultural labor productivity growth over the past 25 years, accounting for 21% and 35% of the productivity growth in poor and rich countries, respectively.

中文翻译：

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资本过时与农业生产力*

抽象的

本文认为，考虑资本实施的技术大大提高了资本在解释农业劳动生产率的跨国差异方面的重要性。为此，我们利用了新颖的农业资本价格数据集。我们记录到，无论从绝对数量还是相对于旧资本而言，较富裕国家中的新资本都更加昂贵。内生地采用不同质量的资本的模型将这些价格差异与资本体现的技术之路联系起来。特别是，我们的模型从新资本的价格中恢复了体现技术的水平，从新资本相对于旧资本的价格中恢复了实现技术的增长率。然后，我们对处于不同发展阶段的16个国家的样本进行了农业质量调整后的资本存量的计量。我们发现，针对质量差异进行调整几乎可以使资本在解决农业劳动生产率的跨国差异方面的重要性提高一倍：从21％增至37％。此外，资本质量的提高已成为过去25年农业劳动生产率增长的重要来源，分别占贫穷国家和富裕国家生产率增长的21％和35％。