THREE ESSAYS ON AGRICULTURAL POLICY

Abstract

This thesis fills the lacuna in the empirical literature on the impact of public expenditures related to agriculture and the political-economy determinants of these expenditures. The thesis comprises of three closely connected stand-alone papers that use cross-country macroeconomic data and undertake a rigorous quantitative analysis to arrive at their results. The first paper finds that public agricultural expenditure (PAE) improved food security for 39 low- and lower-middle income countries between 1990-2012. The second paper shows that public agricultural R&D expenditure contributed to increases in agricultural total factor productivity for 49 countries (across income levels) between 1981-2014. The third paper studies the political-economy determinants of PAE for 45 countries (across income groups) over 2002-2012. It finds a positive, statistically significant association between per capita PAE and democracy; and a negative, statistically significant association between trade share and per capita PAE. This paper also reviews the spatial and temporal variation in PAE.