Technology Demand in the Agriculture

Tóth, József

Keywords: technological development, agriculture, areas of technology, demand for development, demand elasticity, O13, O33, Q11

Technological development is the key to the continuous renewal of the economy. The direction of technological development is usually registered, analysed and evaluated ex-post, when the characteristic trends and influencing factors are also ascertained. Influencing the process of technological development is regarded as natural terrain of economic policy makers. However, in many cases they do not have sufficient and appropriate information.
This paper tries to discontinue the ex-post feature of essays and papers published on the topic up till now. Developing a relatively simple method, it seeks to find the answer to the question, what area (mechanization-, human resource-, seeds and propagation material-, nutrient management- and plant protection) of technological development is most in sync with the demands of agricultural producers.
In our analysis, we used the Hungarian FADN 2013 data. The applied method was the estimation of simple demand functions. We calculated own-price elasticities for the different areas of technology. Our results indicate that human resource development shows the highest elasticity, followed by the plant protection- and machinery development elasticities. We can draw the rather unambiguous consequence, that in the Hungarian agriculture, with respect to the crop production, the development of human resources should be in the focus of technological development.

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