Nonparametric Measures of the Impacts of Public Research Expenditures on Australian Broadacre Agriculture: Preliminary Results

Nonparametric methods are used to measure the impacts of public research expenditures on Australian broadacre agriculture over the 1953-94 period. The data and methods used were unable to recover separate impacts due to extension under several alternative specifications. Preliminary results using both unrestricted and 30 year lagged specifications of the research impacts on productivity suggest that while certain aspects of the recovered multiinput/output technologies are quite robust to alternative specifications (in particular, the associated Malmquist total factor productivity indexes), other aspects are less stable (in particular, the indexes on input (and to a lesser extent, output) biased technical change). An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Conference Global Agricultural Science Policy for the Twenty-First Century, Melbourne, Australia, 26-28 August, 1996.