ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the empirical evidence on productivity and technical change for the aggregate agricultural sector. It describes the descriptive information on agricultural productivity and aggregate technology, that is, the determination of changes in productivity. The chapter also describes the pre-1970 productivity and technical change literature. This literature, as reflected in the debates of the 1950s and 1960s, highlighted the problems of aggregation and identification in estimating the rate of technical progress as residual component of the growth of output and laid the groundwork for much of the subsequent analyses. The empirical techniques for measurement developed during this period relied on index numbers and primal measures of total factor productivity (TFP) and technical change. The methodological linkages between index numbers and production structures that were extensively delineated in the 1970s by Diewert and others were used in the empirical research that emerged in the mid-1970s and 1980s. A synthesis of these methodologies and empirical studies are presented in the chapter.
