Agric. Econ. - Czech, 2015, 61(7):297-313 | DOI: 10.17221/148/2014-AGRICECON

R&D Investments, technology spillovers and agricultural productivity, case of the Czech RepublicOriginal Paper

Tomas RATINGER1, Zuzana KRISTKOVA2
1 Technological Centre of the Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic
2 Department of Economics, Faculty of Economics and Management, Czech University of Life Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic

The objective of the paper is to quantify the effect of the R&D investments on agricultural productivity in the Czech Republic using the co-integration analysis. The effect of the R&D investments is measured by a knowledge stock constructed using a gamma distribution with lags ranging from 7 to 15 years. The relationship between the total factor productivity in agriculture, the domestic knowledge stock and the foreign R&D spillovers approximated by the imports of agricultural technologies is examined using an error correction model. Whereas the estimates confirm that domestic research plays a positive role in agricultural productivity, the results for the foreign R&D spillovers are rather weak. Furthermore, there is little evidence that either length of time or the functional form of weights plays a major role in assessing the dependence of the productivity on R&D investments; however, the models with the knowledge distribution lags longer than 7 years perform better.

Keywords: agricultural research, co-integration analysis, knowledge stock, total factor productivity

Published: July 31, 2015  Show citation

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RATINGER T, KRISTKOVA Z. R&D Investments, technology spillovers and agricultural productivity, case of the Czech Republic. Agric. Econ. - Czech. 2015;61(7):297-313. doi: 10.17221/148/2014-AGRICECON.
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