@article{Pardey:37894,
      recid = {37894},
      author = {Pardey, Philip G. and Alston, Julian M. and Chan-Kang,  Connie and Magalhaes, Eduardo Castelo and Vosti, Stephen  A.},
      title = {Assessing and Attributing the Benefits from Varietal  Improvement Research in Brazil},
      address = {2004},
      number = {605-2016-40246},
      series = {Research Report},
      pages = {102},
      year = {2004},
      abstract = {As the number and variety of interconnected sources of  agricultural innovations have
continued to grow and evolve,  so too have the demands for meaningful evidence of
both the  total payoff and the specific impacts of individual  research providers. Important
policy and practical funding  decisions require a clear understanding of the shares  of
the overall benefits from investments in R&D  attributable to domestic versus foreign and public
versus  private agencies, or even to individual agencies, as well  as the total benefits accruing
from innovation.
This report  provides a detailed economic assessment of the magnitude  and sources of the
economic benefits to Brazil since the  early 1980s from varietal improvements in upland  rice,
edible beans, and soybeans—crops that span a range of  interests from domestic (or even more
localized) food  security concerns, as with rice grown in typically rainfed,  upland production
systems, to crops with important  international trade implications such as soybeans.
The  authors of this study pay particular attention to isolating  the benefits from genetic improvement,
distinct from other  factors that change grain yield or quality. They use  detailed
information of the genetic and breeding histories  of each crop and the institutional arrangements
for more  contemporary crop-improvement research in Brazil to  attribute parts of the overall
benefits to the research  done by various agencies within Brazil, in particular the  Brazilian
Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa,  Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária).
Notably, the  balance of local versus international spillin contributions  to the improvement
of each crop is sensitive to the  particular crop and time period under consideration.  Moreover,
the estimated returns to research are especially  sensitive to approaches taken to account for  the
multiplicity of past and present research providers  involved in Brazilian crop improvements.
Ignoring the  efforts of others results in markedly upward-biased  estimates of the returns to
Embrapa research. Importantly  though, even after attributing the overall benefits among  the
myriad of research providers, the returns to  investments in Embrapa research on the three
study crops  are still substantive.
As well as providing new and  important evidence on Embrapa’s crop-improvement  programs
and their payoffs, this report provides more  general insight into the importance of
addressing  attribution questions in evaluating public research  investments, develops some
methods for doing so, and  illustrates how to apply them.},
      url = {http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/37894},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.22004/ag.econ.37894},
}