ERS sponsored a workshop, Technological and Structural Change in the Transportation Sector: Effects on U.S. Food and Agricultural Trade, March 17-18, 1999, in Washington, DC. The program's objectives were to raise awareness within ERS about the role and importance of transportation in U.S. food...

The controversial introduction of rbST, a laboratory version of bST, a growth hormone that stimulates milk production in cows, may provide hopeful lessons for other foods produced by biotechnology. Milk sales remained steady after rbST became available to dairy farmers, even though a multitude...

This study estimates the total benefit arising from the adoption of agricultural biotechnology in one year (1997) and its distribution among key stakeholders along the production and marketing chain. The analysis focuses on three biotech crops: herbicide-tolerant soybeans, insect-resistant (Bt)...

Intellectual property rights such as patents protect new inventions from imitation and competition. Patents' major objective is to provide incentives for invention, sacrificing short-term market efficiency for long-term economic gains. Although patents are primarily granted to private firms,...

Numerous methods for measuring multifactor productivity have been used by economists. This report uses a recently developed approach, data envlopment analysis, to measure productivity. This method can be used not only to calculate productivity but also to divide productivity measures into...