Antipodean agricultural and resource economics at 60: agricultural innovation

Innovation in agriculture – itself an innovation some 10,000 years ago – is at the centre of many economic and social issues, either as a cause of problems or a solution to them. From the beginning, but especially over the past 150 years, innovation has transformed agriculture and in doing so has contributed to the transformation of whole economies. The consequences have been profoundly important for lives and livelihoods, generally favourable, but almost always with some undesirable consequences for at least some people. Economic and policy issues arise because agricultural research is subject to various market failures, because the resulting innovations and technological changes have important economic consequences for net income and its distribution among individuals and among factors of production, and because the consequences are difficult to discern and attribute among causes. These issues have been studied by economists and documented in the literature on the economics of innovation in agriculture that began as such in the 1950s, around the time of the creation of the Australian Agricultural Economics Society. Members of that nascent society were early contributors to this emerging field of study and have played disproportionately significant roles in it over the ensuing decades.