Technology Spillovers and Land Use Change: Empirical Evidence from Global Agriculture

The existing evidence for the effects of agricultural technological change on cropland use is inadequate to clarify the polarized views on whether encouraging technological progress would slow down the expansion of croplands into forests. This article seeks to inform these views by developing and estimating a model that links the changes in a country’s cropland to the changes in both domestic and foreign total factor productivity (TFP). We find that in most countries of the world, TFP growth is either uncorrelated or is positively associated with cropland expansion. Yet worldwide patterns of TFP growth have been an important source of global land savings. The divergence between the country-level and the global results is explained by the changes in production patterns as countries interact in international markets. Based on our findings, we estimate that in the absence of TFP growth, global cropland expansion from 1991 to 2010 would have been twice as large as observed.