Effect of agricultural research & development on the GDP of EU member states

Mohamed, Susanne – Takács, Szabolcs – Szűcs, István – Bedéné Szőke, Éva

Keywords: EU, R&D intensity, production functions, combination of production factors

Scientific research, together with technological development and innovation, is a key issue of knowledge-based economies. Having recognized this important role, the European Union has identified the increasing of its research budget to be one of its most important aims. The objective of the common programming of agricultural research is to examine the extent to which society is able to answer the challenges resulting from the Community-level development of renewable raw materials.
Joining in the spirit of these endeavours, the aim of our research is to analyze the links between agricultural R&D expenditure and agricultural GDP in the EU member states, relying on the Eurostat database. Our computations were made using constant prices of 2000. The results of our calculations can be summarized as follows:
- The C-D type functions are useful for measuring the approximate impact of the production factors we analyzed.
- In 2000 it was the agricultural assets, and in 2007 the labour, which had a greater contribution to the agricultural GDP. This change indicates that in the meantime, the labour force had acquired more technical expertise, i.e. had accumulated a greater knowledge, and its significance as a production factor had increased.
- The share of agricultural R&D in the production of GDP was approximately 11% in 2000 and 14% in 2007, thus the development efforts are essential from the point of view of agricultural production.

Full article