The growth in agricultural productivity and significance of science and technology in contributing to this growth has been well documented by Bredahl, Cline, Evenson (1967), Griliches (1964), and Peterson. The results of these studies generally indicate that over the past several decades, investment in agricultural research has paid off with relatively high rates of return. Most of this previous work, however, has been directed at estimating returns to aggregate agricultural research in an ex post sense at the national level and does not address the question of potential future returns to research at a state or regional level (Norton). Thus, a particular need exists to develop a methodology for evaluating the potential returns to specific types of... |