The Rate of Return on Expenditures of the South African Agricultural Research Council (arc)

In a situation of increasing accountability and competition for public funding in South Africa, the ARC has to be able to show that its use of public money and both appropriate and effective. Previous studies (Khatri, Thirtle & van Zyl, 1996) have shown that the ROR to public sector agricultural R&D in South Africa is over forty percent. This collection of disaggregated studies estimate rates of return at the institute, crop and project level. This is necessary because knowing that the ROR to public R&D is high has the single policy implication that there has been under-investment. The more difficult issues of priority setting and the allocation of research investments between and within the crop, horticulture and animal enterprises, and between scientific areas like agronomy, plant protection, animal health and biotechnology all need to be studied at lower levels of aggregation.