Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Short-term Outcomes

Participants authored or were heavily cited in the publication:

Shumway, C. Richard, Barbara M. Fraumeni, Lilyan E. Fulginiti, Jon D. Samuels, and Spiro E. Stefanou. "US Agricultural Productivity: A Review of USDA Economic Research Service Methods." Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 38, no. 1 (2016): 1-29.

The study is an external review of a committee appointed by ERS and comprised of the authors of this article. The overarching goals of the review were to assess current practices used in assembling the agricultural productivity accounts, and to review how the USDA (a) documents its efforts and facilitates the ability to replicate and ensure comparability, (b) describes how the community of analysts and scholars use the accounts, (c) cooperates with other agencies to reduce duplication, achieve consistency across statistical series, obtain information at the lowest cost, and capitalize on research and expertise, and (d) establishes priorities subject to resource constraints.

The USDA Economic Research Service has emerged as an acknowledged intellectual leader in the construction and integration of national and state-level productivity accounts in agriculture. The national and state-level ERS productivity measures are widely referred to and used, and international sectoral comparisons rely on the ERS production accounts for foundation methodology in constructing agricultural productivity accounts in other countries. This leadership role has endured for many decades and accelerated in response to the AAEA-USDA Task Force review of the agricultural productivity accounts. It is against this backdrop of vigorous intellectual leadership that an external review committee has examined the data sources, methodology, ongoing research, documentation, and reporting of the ERS agricultural productivity accounts. Our recommendations are many and some are substantial.

Two of the most important recommendations address overarching concerns of documentation and efficiency, two more consider website communication of methods and data, and four focus on the renewal and construction of the state-level accounts.

 Priority 1 Recommendations

Overarching

(1)   Fully document and keep current all procedures followed, from data sources through measurement of productivity change, to enable a non-expert to reproduce the accounts.

(2)   Cooperate with other agencies to reduce duplication, achieve consistency across statistical series, obtain information at the lowest cost, and capitalize on research and expertise.

Website

(1)   Provide detailed documentation online and note ad hoc adjustments to data or deviations from the general procedure (e.g., if fixes were required due to negative implied capital rental rates).

(2)   Expand the website to provide timely access to more detailed data and procedural detail underlying the quantity and price aggregate and sub-aggregate national and state-level statistics.

State-level

(1)   Continue to develop and publish the state-level total productivity measures as well as price and quantity series.

(2)   Cooperate with other governmental agencies to achieve the lowest-cost method of collecting data of sufficient quality to enable the state-level accounts to be extended and maintained.

(3)   Investigate the possibility of using information in the American Community Survey to update matrix elements in the state labor accounts.

(4)   Ensure consistency between the national and state accounts where possible, and explain circumstances that prevent total consistency where it is not possible.

Priority 2 Recommendations

 Labor

(1)   Investigate the reasons for differences in the labor input calculations from those of Jorgenson, Ho, and Samuels (2014).

(2)   Investigate the American Community Survey as an alternative, possibly complementary, data source, potentially in collaboration with BEA/BLS.

 Non-land Capital

(1)   Examine non-land capital nominal investment data in consultation with BEA researchers.

(2)   Consider using one or more asset deflators in the calculation of expected inflation.

(3)   Review investment deflators to determine if sources have been updated or revised since the data was last collected.

(4)   Review average service lives of assets with BEA and BLS to determine if revisions should be made.

(5)   Investigate whether the indexes of capital service flows during the 1975 – 1984 period reflect actual changes in capital service use rather than changes in the behavior of the bonds rate used in calculating the user cost of capital.

 Land

(1)   Explore ways to include within-county land-type adjustments, as well as quality changes given by, for example, irrigation or other improvements in farmland.

(2)   Consistent with the recommendation for non-land capital, replace the GDP deflator used to capture general effects of inflation with a price index for land.

 Outputs

(1)   To account for the distorting effect of crop insurance when outputs are aggregated, add the insurance indemnity to the insured crop’s price and deduct the farmer’s premium.

(2)   Revisit measurement issues related to own-account capital formation, specifically consistency between the output and input sides of the account.

 Quality Adjustments

(1)   Explore methods for incorporating quality adjustments to seeds and consider whether seed quality change should be treated solely as an input, or both an output and an input.

  Cross-country comparisons

(1)   Clarify that ERS cross-country comparisons are really research work, and establish whether they are an integral part of the ERS agenda.

Outputs

Participants published more than 100 articles in peer-review journals in 2016.

Activities

Project participants

·         Organized and contributed to a Choices special issue on herbicide resistant weeds. Choices is the principal outreach vehicle of AAEA (Agricultural and Applied Economics Association).

·         Organized and contributed to a special issue of Environmental Sustainability and Biotechnology: Introduction to AgBioForum Special Issue of the 19th ICABR Conference vol 19 no 2

·         Contributed to Essays in Honor of Wallace Huffman, AgBioForum  vol 18 no 3

·         Organized the workshop The Bio-Economy: Technology and Policy Path Forward. September 30 - October 1, 2016:  Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

·         Organized The International Consortium on Applied Bioeconomy Research 2016 annual conference Financing Innovation for Agriculture, Food, and the Bioeconomy: Business as Usual? June 26–29, 2016 Ravello Amalfi Coast – Italy.

These activities each involved multiple NC-1034 participants.

Milestones

 1.      Contributions to Special Issue of AgBioForum on the Impacts of the Bioeconomy on Agricultural Sustainability, the Environment and Human Health.

2.      A full day pre-conference workshop on “Financing Innovation for the Bioeconomy” at the annual meeting of the International Consortium for Bioeconomy Research emphasizing the role for public-private partnerships, at the ICABR 20th annual conference in June 2016. A related agenda, with many of the same participants will be covered at two invited sessions at the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association annual conference.

3.      Organization of annual research symposium, Tucson AZ, February 26-27.