This article examines how the estimated impacts of crop technologies vary with alternate methods and assumptions, and also discusses the implications of these differences for the design of studies to inform research prioritization. Drawing on international potato research, we show how foresight scenarios, realized by a multi-period global multi-commodity equilibrium model, can affect the estimated magnitudes of welfare impacts and the ranking of different potato research options, as opposed to the static, single-commodity, and country assumptions of the economic surplus model which is commonly used in priority setting studies. Our results suggest that the ranking of technologies is driven by the data used for their specification and is not affected by the foresight scenario examined. However, net benefits vary significantly in each scenario and are greatly overestimated when impacts on non-target countries are ignored. We also argue that the validity of the single-commodity assumption underpinning the economic surplus model is case-specific and depends on the interventions examined and on the objectives and criteria included in a priority setting study.

中文翻译：

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比较评估国际农业研究重点的建模方法

本文研究了作物技术的估计影响如何随替代方法和假设而变化，并讨论了这些差异对设计研究以告知研究优先次序的意义。借助国际马铃薯研究，我们展示了通过多周期全球多商品均衡模型实现的前瞻性情景如何会影响福利影响的估计值以及不同马铃薯研究选择的排名，而不是静态的，单一的，优先确定研究中常用的经济顺差模型的商品和国家假设。我们的结果表明，技术排名由其规格所使用的数据决定，不受所研究的远见情景的影响。然而，每种情况下的净收益差异很大，而忽略对非目标国家的影响时，净收益将大大高估。我们还认为，支撑经济盈余模型的单一商品假设的有效性取决于具体情况，并取决于所研究的干预措施以及优先重点研究中所包括的目标和标准。