The red queen and the hard reds: Productivity growth in American wheat, 1800-1940

• 成果类型: Review
• 署名作者: University of California System; University of California Davis; University of North Carolina; University of North Carolina Chapel Hill; National Bureau of Economic Research
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0507
• DOI: 10.1017/S0022050702001602
• 发表日期: 2002
• 页码: 929-966
• 关键词: UNITED-STATES; returns

摘要

Standard treatments of U.S. agriculture assert that, before the 1930s, productivity growth was almost exclusively the result of mechanization rather than biological innovations. This article shows that U.S. wheat production witnessed wholesale changes in varieties and cultural practices during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Without these changes, vast expanses of the wheat belt could not have sustained commercial production and yields everywhere would have plummeted due to the increasing severity of insects, diseases, and weeds. Revised estimates of Parker and Klein's productivity calculations indicate that biological innovations contributed roughly half of labor-productivity growth between 1839 and 1909.