Skip to main content
Fachgebiete
Automobil + Motoren Bauwesen + Immobilien Business IT + Informatik Elektrotechnik + Elektronik Energie + Nachhaltigkeit Finance + Banking Management + Führung Marketing + Vertrieb Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe Versicherung + Risiko
DE
EN
Bücher
Zeitschriften
Themenseiten
Organisationspsychologie Projektmanagement Marketing Smart Manufacturing
Weitere Formate
Podcasts Webinare Technik Webinare Wirtschaft Kongresse Veranstaltungskalender Awards
Jetzt Einzelzugang starten
Zugang für Unternehmen
Referenzkunden
SLX-Digitalkonferenz: Zukunftswerkstatt 2024

Mehr Umsatz mit Top-Kontakten

Am 7. Mai erfahren Sie, wie Vertriebsteams Leadgenerierung, Leadnurturing und Leadstrategien effizient steuern können.
Erweiterte Suche
Anmelden
nach oben
Erschienen in:
Introduction Kapitel lesen Erstes Kapitel lesen

2017 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

8. Agricultural R&D, Technology, and Obesity

verfasst von : Julian M. Alston, Abigail M. Okrent

Erschienen in: The Effects of Farm and Food Policy on Obesity in the United States

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan US

Einloggen

Aktivieren Sie unsere intelligente Suche, um passende Fachinhalte oder Patente zu finden.

search-config
loading …

Abstract

Agricultural R&D has contributed to obesity by making food more abundant and cheaper, and some commentators have proposed that the agricultural research portfolio could be tilted more in favor of healthy foods, and away from less-healthy foods. We review these ideas in principle, and present a review of prior work and new evidence on the effects of past research investments and on the likely costs of changing the R&D portfolio as a way of fighting obesity in the United States. Our analysis suggests that redirecting agricultural research priorities would be a generally ineffective and highly expensive way of fighting obesity.

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 102.000 Bücher
  • über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
  • Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Versicherung + Risiko




Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Springer Professional "Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 390 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe




 

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren
Vorheriges Kapitel US Farm Subsidies and Obesity
Nächstes Kapitel Fat Taxes and Thin Subsidies as Obesity Policy
Anhänge
Nur mit Berechtigung zugänglich
Fußnoten
1
See for instance Alston et al. (2006), Lakdawalla and Philipson (2002, 2009), Lakdawalla et al. (2005), Miller and Coble (2007, 2008), Mazzochi et al. (2009), and Popkin (2011).
 
2
The Specialty Crop Competitiveness Act of 2004 (PL 108-465) defines specialty crops as: fruits and vegetables, tree nuts, dried fruits, and nursery crops, including floriculture.
 
3
Details in this section are drawn from Pardey et al. (2013c).
 
4
These authors used the World Bank classifications of countries according to gross national income per capita, available at http://​data.​worldbank.​org/​news/​new-country-classifications-2015.
 
5
Partial factor productivity (PFP) measures refer to total output per unit of a particular input, such as land or labor. Multifactor productivity (MFP) measures refer to total output per unit of an aggregate of all inputs, where the aggregation uses appropriate weights for the different categories of inputs. PFPs and MFPs can refer to output of a particular product (e.g., wheat) or to an aggregate across all products. A special case of MFP is total factor productivity (TFP) in which all outputs and all inputs are taken explicitly into account. In practice, a very broadly based MFP measure is the best we can do, since we cannot always measure every input and every output.
 
6
Significant among these are substitution of other inputs and machines for increasingly expensive labor in many places, and increased use of synthetic fertilizers, especially nitrogen, and irrigation. Although not the direct result of agricultural R&D per se, these “modern” inputs were developed and applied in a complementary fashion with varietal and other technologies that were the direct result of agricultural R&D.
 
7
As discussed by Alston et al. (2006), some of the price increases for specialty crops might reflect premia for changes in quality, variety, or seasonal availability, which might not have been fully addressed in the indexing procedure.
 
8
AAJP (2010b, 2011) used a gamma lag distribution to capture the relationship between research investments in each of the past 50 years and today’s knowledge stock with a peak at a lag of 24 years. AMO (2016a) adapted this approach to model how knowledge stocks affect commodity prices, and we borrow from their work in what follows.
 
9
The estimated multiplier, or elasticity, was restricted to be the same for all groups, and estimated as –2.385. This estimate indicates that a 10% increase in a commodity-specific stock of knowledge in a particular year, say 2007 (e.g., from a 10% increase in research spending in each of the preceding 50 years) would cause a 24% decrease in the price of that commodity in the same year (i.e., 2007).
 
10
Popkin (2009) refers to policies “nurturing agriculture” at least as early as 1850 (which he mentions explicitly), prior to the creation of the USDA and the land grant colleges. One wonders, does he include the Homestead Act among these policies that pushed the food system in an unhealthy direction?
 
11
McAfee (1983) provides an amusing demonstration of the challenge of defining counterfactuals and using them to measure consequences of large changes.
 
12
The average male in the United States was 69.3 inches tall and weighed 195.5 pounds, for a BMI of 28.6 (= 703 × [195.5/(69.32)]) (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2012). To get to a BMI of 25, the average male would have to weigh 170.8 pounds, or 24.7 pounds less.
 
Literatur
Alston, J.M. 2012. “US Food and Nutrition Programs: Costs, Effectiveness, and Impact on Obesity,” in American Boondoggle: Fixing the 2012 Farm Bill. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute.
Alston, J.M., and P.G. Pardey. 1996. Making Science Pay: Economics of Agricultural R&D Policy. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy.
Alston, J.M., and P.G. Pardey. 2001. “Attribution and Related Problems in Assessing the Returns to Agricultural R&D.” Agricultural Economics 25: 141–152.CrossRef
Alston, J.M., and P.G. Pardey. 2008. “Public Funding for Research into Specialty Crops.” HortScience 43(5): 1461–1470.
Alston, J.M., M.C. Marra, P.G. Pardey, and T.J. Wyatt. 2000. A Meta Analysis of Rates of Return to Agricultural R&D: Ex Pede Herculem?. IFPRI Research Report No 113. Washington, DC: IFPRI.
Alston, J.M., J.W. Freebairn, and J.S. James. 2004. “Levy-Funded Research Choices by Producers and Society.” Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics 48(1): 34–64.CrossRef
Alston, J.M., D.A. Sumner, and S.A. Vosti. 2006. “Are Agricultural Policies Making Us Fat? Likely Links between Agricultural Policies and Human Nutrition and Obesity, and Their Policy Implications.” Review of Agricultural Economics 28(3): 313–322.CrossRef
Alston, J.M., J.M. Beddow, and P.G. Pardey. 2009b. “Agricultural Research, Productivity and Food Prices in the Long Run.” Science 325(4): 1209–1210.CrossRef
Alston, J.M., P.G. Pardey, J.S. James, and M.A. Andersen. 2009c. “A Review of Research on the Economics of Agricultural R&D.” Annual Review of Resource Economics 1(October): 537–565.CrossRef
Alston, J.M., M.A. Andersen, J.S. James, and P.G. Pardey. 2010b. Persistence Pays: U.S. Agricultural Productivity Growth and the Benefits from Public R&D Spending. New York: Springer Publishers.CrossRef
Alston, J.M., M.A. Andersen, J.S. James, and P.G. Pardey. 2011. “The Economic Returns to U.S. Public Agricultural Research.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 93(5): 1257–1277.CrossRef
Alston, J.M., M.A. Andersen, and P.G. Pardey. 2016. “The Rise and Fall of U.S. Farm Productivity Growth, 1910–2007.” Staff Paper P15-02, Department of Applied Economics, University of Minnesota.
Alston, J.M., J.P. MacEwan, and A.M. Okrent. 2016a. “Effects of U.S. Public Agricultural R&D on U.S. Obesity and its Social Costs.” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 38(3): 492–520.CrossRef
Bittman, M., M. Pollan, R. Salvador, and O. De Schutter. 2015. “A National Food Policy for the 21st Century.” Medium. Available at https://​medium.​com/​@michaelpollan/a-national-food-policy-for-the-21st-century-7d323ee7c65f.
Bleich, S., D. Cutler, C. Murray, and A. Adams. 2008. “Why is the Developed World Obese?.” Annual Reviews of Public Health 29: 273–295.CrossRef
Carter, C.A., G.C. Rausser, and A.D. Smith. 2016. “Commodity Storage and the Market Effects of Biofuel Policies.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 98(5): 1–15.CrossRef
Cash, S.B., D.L. Sunding, and D. Zilberman, “Fat Taxes and Thin Subsidies: Prices, Diet and Health Outcomes,” Acta Agriculturae Scandinavica (2005) 2 (Section C): 167–174.
Drewnowski, A., and N. Darmon. 2005. “The Economics of Obesity: Dietary Energy Density and Energy Cost.” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 82(1S): 265S–273S.
Drewnowski, A., and S. Specter. 2004. “Poverty and Obesity: The Role of Energy Density and Energy Costs.” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 79(1): 6–16.
Evenson, R.E. 2002. “Economic Impacts of Agricultural Research and Extension,” Chapter 11 in B.L. Gardner and G.C. Rausser eds. Handbook of Agricultural Economics, Volume 1A: Agricultural Production. New York: Elsevier.
Fuglie, K., and A. Toole. 2014. “The Evolving Institutional Structure of Public and Private Agricultural Research.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 96: 862–883.CrossRef
Fuglie, K.O., and P.W. Heisey. 2007. Economic Returns to Public Agricultural Research. USDA, ERS Economic Brief No. 10. Washington, DC: USDA Economic Research Service, September.
Grandi, S.M., and C. Franck. 2012. “Agricultural Subsidies: Are They a Contributing Factor to the American Obesity Epidemic?.” Archives of Internal Medicine 172(22): 1754–1755.CrossRef
Hurley, T.M, X. Rao, and P.G. Pardey “Re-examining the Reported Rates of Return to Food and Agricultural Research and Development.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 96(5): 1492–1504.
Institute of Medicine. 2012. Accelerating Progress in Obesity Prevention: Solving the Weight of the Nation. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
Lakdawalla, D., and T. Philipson. 2002. “The Growth of Obesity and Technological Change: A Theoretical And Empirical Examination.” NBER Working Paper No. 8946. National Bureau of Economic Research, May.
Lakdawalla, D., and T. Philipson. 2009. “The Growth of Obesity and Technological Change.” Economics and Human Biology 7(3): 283–293.CrossRef
Lakdawalla, D., T. Philipson, and J. Bhattacharya. 2005. “Welfare-Enhancing Technological Change and the Growth of Obesity.” American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings 92(2): 253–257.CrossRef
MacEwan, J.P., J.M. Alston, and A.M. Okrent. 2014. “The Consequences of Obesity for the External Costs of Public Health Insurance in the United States.” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 36(4): 696–716.CrossRef
Mazziochi, M., B. Traill, and J.F. Shogren. 2009. Fat Economics: Nutrition, Health, and Economic Policy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.CrossRef
McAfee, R.P. 1983. “American Economic Growth and the Voyage of Columbus.” American Economic Review 73(4): 735–740.
Miller, J.C., and K.H. Coble. 2007. “Cheap Food Policy: Fact or Rhetoric?.” Food Policy 32: 98–111.CrossRef
Miller, J.C., and K.H. Coble. 2008. “An International Comparison of the Effects of Government Agricultural Support on Food Budget Shares.” Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics 40(2): 551–558.CrossRef
Ogden, C.L., C.D. Fryar, M.D. Carroll, and K.M. Flegal. 2004. “Mean Body Weight, Height and Body Mass Index, United States 1960–2002.” Advance Data for Vital and Health Statistics 347.
Pardey, P.G., B. Koo, J. Drew, J. Horwich, and C. Nottenburg. 2013a. “The Evolving Landscape of Plant Varietal Rights in the United States, 1930–2008.” Nature Biotechnology 3(1): 25–29.CrossRef
Pardey, P.G., J.M. Alston, and C. Chan-Kang. 2013b. “Public Agricultural R&D over the Past Half Century: An Emerging New World Order.” Agricultural Economics 44: 103–113.CrossRef
Popkin, B. 2009. The World Is Fat: The Fads, Trends, Policies and Products That Are Fattening the Human Race. New York, NY: Avery.
Popkin, B.M. 2011. “Agricultural Policies, Food and Public Health.” EMBO Reports 12(1): 11–18.CrossRef
Okrent, A.M., and J.M. Alston. 2012. “The Effects of Farm Commodity and Retail Food Policies on Obesity and Economic Welfare in the United States.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 94(1): 611–646.CrossRef
Metadaten
Titel
Agricultural R&D, Technology, and Obesity
verfasst von
Julian M. Alston
Abigail M. Okrent
Copyright-Jahr
2017
Buch
The Effects of Farm and Food Policy on Obesity in the United States

Print ISBN: 978-1-137-48647-9

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-137-47831-3

Copyright-Jahr: 2017

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47831-3_8