Sources of Sectoral Growth in an Economy Wide Context: The Case of U.S. Agriculture

Growth in US agriculture is linked to the non-farm economy through domestic terms of trade and factor market adjustments. With almost stable input growth, the relatively large contributions from growth in Total Factor Productivity (TFP) are off-set by declining real prices of primary farm products. The resulting net growth in value of farm output, at 0.25 % per annum, implies that the gains in TFP are shared by intermediate and final consumers of farm products. The decomposition of TFP suggests that public agricultural stock of knowledge and infrastructure are 'robustly' associated with TFP growth, while spill-overs from private agricultural and economy wide Research and Development (R&D) are positive but, relatively small.