The global market for agri-food products has been divided for a decade. The division arose over the approval of biotechnology-based innovations – with the European Union temporarily suspending approvals and imports until it could devise a new approval mechanism. Other countries chose between...

A new procedure is developed to estimate innovation possibility frontiers and test for biases in technological change. Using data on four inputs (land, machinery, chemicals and labour) from central Canada (Ontario and Quebec) over the period 1926-1985, we find that the innovations possibilities...

The paper presents an examination of genetic-based technological change in the Canadian beef cattle industry. A model of technological change is explicitly developed in characteristics space. Production functions with genetic characteristics as arguments are estimated and two forms of...

Environmental tariffs appear to be a politically necessary part of the climate change policies that are emerging in many countries. The appeal of level playing field arguments is seductive and difficult to dispute. Environmental policy makers, however, may be naïve, because they fail to account...

Although there is increasing emphasis on targeting of improved technology towards poor and female farmers, few adoption studies assess the uptake of new practices by these groups in a comprehensive manner. In this study, community members used the wealth ranking method to identify the different...

The measurement of the impact of technical change has received significant attention within the economics literature. One popular method of quantifying this impact of technical change is the use of growth accounting index numbers. However, in a recent article Nelson and Pack (1999) criticise the...

Surveys on consumer acceptance of GM foods revealed differences in knowledge, risk perception and acceptance of GM foods in Japan, Norway, Spain, Taiwan and the United States. There were opponents and proponents of GM foods. However, even in the United States, one of the most supportive...

China is a key player in global agricultural markets, and the number one importer of U.S. soybeans and cotton, whereby soybeans and cotton are two of the main biotech commodities commercialized in the United States. As of 2005, 87% of soybeans and 79% of cotton planted in the U.S. were biotech....

The determinants of innovation and the role of intellectual property rights in different countries are not well understood. This paper estimates the determinants of innovation using a new panel dataset. It compares different panel estimation methods appropriate for finite size samples. Past R&D...