Uncovering Productivity Growth in the Disaggregate: Indonesia's Dueling Agricultural Sub-Sectors

The success of seed-fertilizer technologies and government subsidies in attaining nearly self-sufficient rice production in the mid-1980s encouraged the Indonesian government soon afterward to shift resources away from food crops and toward export-oriented crops. These shifts were reinforced by trade liberalization and a sharp devaluation of the rupiah after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which exerted Indonesia’s comparative advantage in tropical perennial products. In the present paper, we ask whether such events have altered Indonesia’s agricultural growth strategy from a food-crop to an export-crop one. With an innovative multi-output stochastic distance frontier model and provincial production and policy-related data from 1985 to 2005, we estimate technology growth by agricultural subsector and efficiency improvement by political jurisdiction. The perennial-crop sector is found to have achieved the highest technology growth rate, followed by the livestock and annual-crop sectors. We find overall productivity growth to have been moderate, and suggest that little of it can be attributed to Indonesia’s public research efforts.agricultural research, Indonesia, Shephard distance function, stochastic frontier, technical change, technical efficiency, International Development, Productivity Analysis, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

International comparison and evaluation of agricultural productivity growth

Long-run food price changes respond to long-run changes in food demand, quasi-fixed and variable production factors, and agricultural productivity. Recent global food-price volatility puts a renewed spotlight on the trends and sources of any agricultural productivity growth. Because food prices’ most critical effects are on human hunger, it is especially important to examine productivity conditions in newly emerging economies. Two such economies evaluated in this dissertation are Indonesia and Brazil. As agriculture’s share of the Indonesian economy declines in the post-Green Revolution era, government attention increasingly has shifted to the industrial sector and away from agriculture. In light of these trends, we use province-level data and a multi-output frontier distance function approach to estimate product-specific productivity change on Indonesian farms, decomposing it into its technical-change and efficiency-change components. We find, at a 1.4% annual growth rate, that technical change has been modest and that little of this growth can be ascribed to government research efforts. Furthermore, average farm efficiency relative to the best-practice frontier has declined 0.4% per annum, so that mean productivity has risen by only 1% per year. Over-centralization of the agricultural research system may partly account for this poor performance. Brazil now is the largest coffee, sugar, and fruit juice producer, second-largest soybean and beef producer, and third-largest corn and broiler producer. It has overtaken the U.S. in poultry exports, nearly matches the U.S. in soybean exports, and dominates global trade in frozen orange juice. To test and better understand these advances, we draw on decennial farm censuses to examine technical change and efficiency in Brazilian agriculture. Our approach is to estimate a stochastic, multi-product, output distance frontier, using a translog functional form and data disaggregated to the micro-region (sub-state) level. Using two consecutive decennial farm censuses, we combine state-level Fisher productivity-change indexes with state-level translog distance function estimates of growth technical efficiency to impute state-level technical shifts. We find, leading up to the soon-to-be-released 2006 agricultural census, that Brazil’s multi-factor productivity growth rate between 1985 and 1996 was 20.2%. Mean state-level growth efficiency was 91.2%, implying the production frontier expanded 22.2% over the reference time period

Agricultural policy and productivity: evidence from Brazilian censuses

Brazil's economic strategy has shifted hesitatingly during the last several decades from one of producer protection to trade competitiveness. Exploiting the variations these shifts have afforded, we use a sequence of decennial agricultural censuses to examine Brazilian policy implications for agricultural competitiveness and efficiency. Total factor productivity is decomposed into best-technology and efficiency elements, each subject to policy influence. We find technology growth, at 4.5% per annum, to have been extraordinarily high, particularly in the south. But because productivity among average producers has fallen rapidly behind that on the technical frontier, total productivity growth has been a much more modest 2.6% per year. Public agricultural research programs most benefit the country's technological leaders, widening the gap between frontier and average producer. Credit, education, and road construction policies instead narrow that gap. Credit and road programs especially enhance efficiency in the south, where efficiency losses have been greatest.This is the publisher’s final pdf. The article is copyrighted by the International Association of Agricultural Economists and published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. It can be found at: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0169-5150Keywords: Efficiency, Embrapa, Input distance function, Stochastic frontier, Brazilian agriculture, Technical change, Total factor productivityKeywords: Efficiency, Embrapa, Input distance function, Stochastic frontier, Brazilian agriculture, Technical change, Total factor productivit

Reproducibility of the ribosomal RNA synthesis ratio in sputum and association with markers of mycobacterium tuberculosis burden

The MIND-IHOP study was funded by the IHOP grant (NIH R01 HL090335), Lung MicroCHIP grant (NIH U01 HL098964), and K24 grant (NIH K24 HL087713). These sources provided the funding to support participant enrollment and specimen collection. Emmanuel Musisi was supported by a scholarship from the Pulmonary Complications of AIDS Research Training Program (NIH D43 TW009607). N.D.W., R.M.S., J.L.D., and P.N. acknowledge funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (1R01AI127300-01A1). N.D.W. and M.I.V. acknowledge funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (1R21AI135652-01). N.D.W. acknowledges funding from Veterans Affairs (1IK2CX000914-01A1 and 1I01BX004527-01A1) and from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Clinical Scientist Development Award.There is a critical need for improved pharmacodynamic markers for use in human tuberculosis (TB) drug trials. Pharmacodynamic monitoring in TB has conventionally used culture or molecular methods to enumerate the burden of Mycobacterium tuberculosis organisms in sputum. A recently proposed assay called the rRNA synthesis (RS) ratio measures a fundamentally novel property, how drugs impact ongoing bacterial rRNA synthesis. Here, we evaluated RS ratio as a potential pharmacodynamic monitoring tool by testing pretreatment sputa from 38 Ugandan adults with drug-susceptible pulmonary TB. We quantified the RS ratio in paired pretreatment sputa and evaluated the relationship between the RS ratio and microbiologic and molecular markers of M. tuberculosis burden. We found that the RS ratio was highly repeatable and reproducible in sputum samples. The RS ratio was independent of M. tuberculosis burden, confirming that it measures a distinct new property. In contrast, markers of M. tuberculosis burden were strongly associated with each other. These results indicate that the RS ratio is repeatable and reproducible and provides a distinct type of information from markers of M. tuberculosis burden. Importance This study takes a major next step toward practical application of a novel pharmacodynamic marker that we believe will have transformative implications for tuberculosis. This article follows our recent report in Nature Communications that an assay called the rRNA synthesis (RS) ratio indicates the treatment-shortening of drugs and regimens. Distinct from traditional measures of bacterial burden, the RS ratio measures a fundamentally novel property, how drugs impact ongoing bacterial rRNA synthesis.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Identifying patients with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis who may benefit from shorter durations of treatment.

ObjectiveStudying treatment duration for rifampicin-resistant and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR/RR-TB) using observational data is methodologically challenging. We aim to present a hypothesis generating approach to identify factors associated with shorter duration of treatment.Study design and settingWe conducted an individual patient data meta-analysis among MDR/RR-TB patients restricted to only those with successful treatment outcomes. Using multivariable linear regression, we estimated associations and their 95% confidence intervals (CI) between the outcome of individual deviation in treatment duration (in months) from the mean duration of their treatment site and patient characteristics, drug resistance, and treatments used.ResultsOverall, 6702 patients with successful treatment outcomes from 84 treatment sites were included. We found that factors commonly associated with poor treatment outcomes were also associated with longer treatment durations, relative to the site mean duration. Use of bedaquiline was associated with a 0.51 (95% CI: 0.15, 0.87) month decrease in duration of treatment, which was consistent across subgroups, while MDR/RR-TB with fluoroquinolone resistance was associated with 0.78 (95% CI: 0.36, 1.21) months increase.ConclusionWe describe a method to assess associations between clinical factors and treatment duration in observational studies of MDR/RR-TB patients, that may help identify patients who can benefit from shorter treatment

The therapeutic potential of epigenetic manipulation during infectious diseases.

Epigenetic modifications are increasingly recognized as playing an important role in the pathogenesis of infectious diseases. They represent a critical mechanism regulating transcriptional profiles in the immune system that contributes to the cell-type and stimulus specificity of the transcriptional response. Recent data highlight how epigenetic changes impact macrophage functional responses and polarization, influencing the innate immune system through macrophage tolerance and training. In this review we will explore how post-translational modifications of histone tails influence immune function to specific infectious diseases. We will describe how these may influence outcome, highlighting examples derived from responses to acute bacterial pathogens, models of sepsis, maintenance of viral latency and HIV infection. We will discuss how emerging classes of pharmacological agents, developed for use in oncology and other settings, have been applied to models of infectious diseases and their potential to modulate key aspects of the immune response to bacterial infection and HIV therapy

Polycomb repressive complex PRC1 spatially constrains the mouse embryonic stem cell genome.

The Polycomb repressive complexes PRC1 and PRC2 maintain embryonic stem cell (ESC) pluripotency by silencing lineage-specifying developmental regulator genes. Emerging evidence suggests that Polycomb complexes act through controlling spatial genome organization. We show that PRC1 functions as a master regulator of mouse ESC genome architecture by organizing genes in three-dimensional interaction networks. The strongest spatial network is composed of the four Hox gene clusters and early developmental transcription factor genes, the majority of which contact poised enhancers. Removal of Polycomb repression leads to disruption of promoter-promoter contacts in the Hox gene network. In contrast, promoter-enhancer contacts are maintained in the absence of Polycomb repression, with accompanying widespread acquisition of active chromatin signatures at network enhancers and pronounced transcriptional upregulation of network genes. Thus, PRC1 physically constrains developmental transcription factor genes and their enhancers in a silenced but poised spatial network. We propose that the selective release of genes from this spatial network underlies cell fate specification during early embryonic development

ASSESSING BRAZIL’s CERRADO AGRICULTURAL MIRACLE: AN UPDATE

Brazil’s emergence as a primary global agricultural producer is often credited to production expansion into soils of the Brazilian savannah or Cerrado. These soils are, however, deficient in important nutrients and prone to degradation, requiring input-intensive processes that suggest a low level of productive efficiency. Employing a sequence of agricultural censuses and a biome approach for characterizing agricultural zones, the present study evaluates the Cerrado’s total factor productivity growth and productive potential. The analysis highlights the resource cost of Brazil’s “Cerrado Miracle,” the role of paved road infrastructure in expanding production opportunities, and the significant production gains that the Cerrado may yet achieve. Results suggest a substantial productivity gap between the Cerrado’s most efficient and average producers, implying that Cerrado production might well be further boosted if average producers succeed in adopting the technologies and management practices of the more efficient operators. More generally, and to the extent the Cerrado model is generalizable elsewhere, agricultural development of the world’s savannahs, such as sub-Saharan Africa’s Guinea regions, into breadbaskets will be expensive in terms of material inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides, depending for their success therefore on the real prices of these inputs