農業の生産関数の計測

展望

抄録

The purpose of this paper is to survey estimation of production function, cost function, and profit function of Japanese agriculture since 1980.
I expected that in the study of measurement of agricultural production function there would be many papers which chose the translog type as a functional form because of its superior properties. However, my classification of the papers by functional form shows an entirely different figure. I classify the papers into five subjects; namely assessment of agricultural policy, economles of scale and enlargement of scale, technological progress and productivity (including the total factor productivity, which is abbreviated to TFP), equilibrium of factor input, and other aspects. The numbers of these subjects are, respectively, one, six, twelve, fifteen, and three. We can easily see that the papers evaluating policy are very few.
Desirable nonparametric estimation methods of TFP have recently developed, but few authors have tried it. I estimate TFP of Japanese rice production by means of a nonparametric method and the result shows the slow or negative growth of TFP since 1975. I think that the major reason of this stagnation has been the acreage allotment program, “Gentan Seisaku”, since 1969.
There are many issues can be handled by the applied production analysis, especially by the utilization of production and cost functions. As an example, the discover of the stagnation of TFP mentioned above gives us fruitful information to evaluate the acreage allotment program. I hope that many researchers will evaluate agricultural policies and investigate structural changesof Japanese agriculture by using production and cost functions.