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AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH Contemporary changes in the crop sciences and the intellectual property regimes surrounding that science are prompting probing questions about the future roles of publicly funded and conducted crop-improvement research in the United States and elsewhere in the world. Questions also continue to be raised about U.S. contributions to international R&D and international agreements concerning crop genetic resources. The first phase of this research is undertaking a detailed economic assessment of the extent and value of varietal change in the U.S. rice and wheat crops since 1970, and, most importantly, the myriad and changing sources of the germplasm that underpin this varietal change. Special emphasis is being given to identifying the pattern and economic significance of cross-state and international germplasm flows to aid policy choices about the deployment of state and federal funding for public crop-improvement research and the U.S. position regarding international germplasm access and benefit sharing agreements. A second, parallel phase of the research is analyzing the international flows and economic impacts of rice and wheat varieties among all the world's major producers of these two crops, tracking in detail the sources of these economic impacts. Core Collaborating Individuals and Institutions
AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH Utilizing a revised and updated set of state-specific agricultural productivity estimates that begin in 1949, plus state specific and intramural USDA series that begin in 1890 this research will provide an entirely new and up-to-date set of state-specific economic estimates of the local and spillover (i.e., both spillouts to other states and spillins from other states and federal labs) consequences of SAES (State Agricultural Experiment Station) and intramural USDA research. The activities being undertaken as elements of this research can be partitioned into two main sections: Research Expenditure Patterns Core Collaborating Individuals and Institutions
AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH The overriding objective is to identify the prospective magnitude and incidence of the payoff to crop biotechnology research globally by developing a hierarchy of decision aids and undertaking targeted applications for selected stakeholder groups. This research is designed to conduct "meso-scale" assessments of the likely economic consequences of specific commodity/biotechnology/agro-ecological research investment and technology commercialization options. These assessments are intended to address the fundamental economic questions of a) how much to invest in specific lines of crop bioengineering research; b) who should do what research, or commercialize its outcomes; and c) who ought to pay for it. The economic implications of these biotechnologies-specifically their prospective impacts on the quantities of crops produced, consumed, and traded; their commodity price consequences; and the economic costs and benefits to producers, consumers and governments-are being systematically examined to identify their research investment implications. A highlight of the analysis is the capacity to look beyond local impacts to ascertain the regional and international spillover consequences of the strategic biotechnology choices that lay before us. Our examinations will identify fruitful areas of investment by self-interested public and private agencies (including life science or biotech companies as well as self-funded or partially supported producer initiatives and taxpayer funded R&D), stimulate partnerships of collectively funded research (whether that involves different governments funding research of mutual interest, or consortiums involving public and private partners), and indicate where substantial regional or global payoffs may occur via various forms of research aid or philanthropy. Since the underlying production and consumption data will be spatially disaggregated at a sub-national level, notions of the location and scale of potential environmental and food safety concerns can also be assessed and characterized. Core Collaborating Individuals and Institutions
HEALTH RESEARCH Recent estimates put total biomedical research spending in the United States at $94.3 billion in 2003 (Moses et al. JAMA 2005). The federal government component of that funding grew from $8.3 billion in 1990 to over $28.1 billion last year-an annual rate of growth in spending of 17.1 percent, or 11.2 percent per year after accounting for inflation (NSF 2004). This is a much more rapid ramping up of spending than in other areas of research; in contrast, the real growth in federal spending on agricultural research and development (R&D) since 1990 was only 1.7 percent per year, while spending on energy research actually fell by more than 50 percent over this same period. Increasingly, questions about the magnitude of this rise in spending and at least implicitly, the overall (i.e., social) economic returns on this research investment are being asked. Moreover, decisions continue to be made-mostly in the absence of relevant economic information-on how best to deploy the funds for medical research, both in terms of maximizing their overall social returns and benefiting particular target groups. Assessing the magnitude and distribution of economic returns to medical research is challenging. Some of these challenges-including the often long and variable lags between investing in R&D and realizing a successful innovation, and the subsequent lags as medical advances diffuse throughout an economy; the intrinsic uncertainties involved in medical research; the "spill-ins" and "spill-outs" as research done in one agency, locale or sector of the economy shows up elsewhere; and the difficulties in isolating the economic effects of medical research distinct from the effects of other research and other changes that affect health outcomes-have their counterparts in efforts to assess the impacts of other (bio-)sciences. Drawing from past work focused on the agricultural biosciences, the evaluation tools being developed as part of this research are directed toward economically evaluating medical research. Some problems are unique, or pertain with more force, to evaluations of medical research. Not least among these are the behavioral responses induced by technical change in the medical sciences, such that the overall social returns to medical R&D may be more or less than the sum of the returns to specific health-enhancing technologies. With these aspects in mind, this research is geared to improving and, where needed, developing the methods required to evaluate the overall economic returns to investments in R&D in the medical and health-related sciences. The specific aims are to: • Establish a set of criteria for identifying biomedical technologies amenable to economic impact analysis. • Undertake a comprehensive assessment of available health-related data for assessing the diffusion of and welfare consequences attributable to individual or interrelated biomedical technologies in the United States. • Develop and calibrate methods for measuring the diffusion and welfare consequences of individual or interrelated biomedical technologies. Core Collaborating Individuals and Institutions
As economists, we invest in economics research partly because we are fascinated by economic behavior and relationships. Moving beyond myopic self interest, we also genuinely believe that careful and thorough economics research focusing on growth and on the needs of the poor has tremendous potential to benefit the lives of people throughout the global community, often by vastly improving the policymaking process and policy decisions. That we, as economists, believe strongly that economics research is worth a great deal is regrettably viewed by research funders and administrators as a less-than-compelling justification for future economics research funding. Public and private sources of research funds exhibit similar skepticism about the claims of many other science, social science, and technology disciplines on their purse. However, many of those other disciplines have appealed to a third-party arbitrator-the economics profession-to demonstrate what their research is worth. Economists are less fortunate. We have to appeal to ourselves. The outputs of economics research are rarely as tangible as those of the science and technology disciplines with which economics often competes for funding. Economists provide analysis and information, especially in the context of policy processes and debates, not better medical procedures. Nevertheless, the contributions of economics research to the daily quality of life of individuals and communities across the world can be substantial. Information that improves macroeconomics policymaking preempts catastrophic recessions. Research that establishes mechanisms for the efficient creation and functioning of markets enables societies to experience long-run economic growth and dramatic improvements in per capita incomes. Timely economic analysis in setting and implementing policies frequently forestalls socially wasteful resource allocations and reveals the impacts of proposed policy changes on different social groups (for example, low- and high-income income households, producers and consumers, different ethnic groups, and rural and urban sectors). Documenting the value of economics research has generally been a task that economists have been reluctant to take on, especially compared with their willingness to investigate the value of science and technology research. Based on research launched at the International Food Policy Research Institute, InSTePP affiliates sought to identify some of the methodological and practical paths to valuing economic research, with a specific focus on its utility in the policy process. The research culminated in the 2004 publication of a book What's Economics Worth: Valuing Policy Research and a number of related publications. Core Collaborating Individuals and Institutions
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