An intercountry comparison of agricultural production efficiency[J

Intercountry cross-section comparison of total productivity in agriculture showed that differences in production efficiency were small relative to differences in labor productivity among countries at a same stage of economic development but very large among different stages of development. Moreover, the large differences in total productivity between the developed and the less developed countries widened further during the past two decades. The results suggest a hypothesis that agriculture in the less developed countries as a whole has not yet entered the phase of " modern economic growth " ala Kuznets. Key words: international comparison, total input, total productivity. The index of total productivity defined as the ratio of total output to the aggregate of con-ventional inputs has been extensively used to measure contributions of improvements in production efficiency to the growth in output over time (Peterson and Hayami). This study represents the first attempt to apply this meth-odology to the cross-section comparison of agricultural production efficiency among countries at different stages of economic de-velopment. Unlike Hayami and Hayami and Ruttan, this study does not aim at accounting for the sources of the measured productivity differences by nonconventional inputs such as education and research. Instead, it attempts to find "stylized facts " of the Kuznets sense on the relationship between the levels of agricul-tural production efficiency measured as a re-sidual unexplained by conventional inputs and of economic development for the purpose of stimulating further theoretical and empirical investigations. Method and Data The method used in this study is a straight-forward application of the total productivit