Agricultural Productivity Differences among Countries

This chapter demonstrates the approach used by Vernon Ruttan and Yujiro Hayami in their study, which involves the estimation of a cross-country production function of the Cobb-Douglas type for thirty-eight developed and underdeveloped countries. In the estimation, the differences in agricultural output per worker are accounted for by variations in the level of conventional and non-conventional inputs per worker and classified as internal resource accumulation, technical inputs supplied by the non-agriculture sector, and human capital. The independent variables used in the study include labor, land, livestock, fertilizer, machinery, education, and technical manpower.