Rates of Return on Agricultural Research Expenditures in Argentina

This paper surveys three papers that expored the topic of returns on agricultural reserach expenditures in Argentina. Two, Elias (1971) and del Ray (1975), studied this problem with data on sugarcane, and the third, Feijoo (1984), dealt with aggregate agricultural data. The main task was to recompute the reported findings so as to get two rates of return that have been widely used to present the results of studies of this type: the internal rate of return and the rate of return of benefits over costs using an ecternal rate of 10 percent. The main finding is that annual rates of return on agricultural reserach expenditures in Argentina are of the same order of magnitude as the ones found in similar studies for other countries