At the end of my last post, I said I was going to write about whether there is still a place for development economics in agricultural economics departments in light of how development economics has changed over the last 20 years to go from a field of economics looking at how market failures constrain economic development to being a “field” of economics about anything and everything, as long as it uses causal inference methods and uses data from a low- or middle-income country, loosely defined.
While you may think this is an inside baseball post about agricultural economics, the first half of this post is about development economics overall, and even the bit about agricultural economics might provide food for thought for people outside of agricultural economics.
Agricultural Economics
First off, a clarification, or perhaps a definition. Someone recently mentioned to me that the interesting thing about agricultural economics is that it is at times a field of economics (which should need no explanation), and at other times a distinct “discipline” in the sense that agricultural economics is typically found in departments distinct from a university’s economics department. This is because agricultural economics departments were created by a series of federal acts starting with the Morrill Act of 1862, which created a network of land-grant universities whose reason for being is to do publicly useful research.1
Unless noted otherwise, when I talk of agricultural economics in this post, I will be referring to the latter definition, i.e., agricultural economics as being more than just a field of economics, up to and including being its own discipline.
Development Economics
Second, a bit of history. As I mentioned in my previous post, there was a time when development economics was seen as a fringe field of economics. If you have never read Leijonhufvud’s (1973) tongue-in-cheek ethnography of the economics profession (and if you’re reading this, you probably haven’t; in correspondence about something else, Timothy Taylor told me last summer that “pretty much no one under the age of 50 has heard of [Leijonhufvud (1973)]”), do yourself a favor and read it: You’ll notice that the development economists were then ostensibly at the bottom of the social hierarchy of economics for committing the sin of incorporating ideas from anthropology, political science, sociology, and other such icky, soft, and fluffy disciplines.2
Sometime in the 1980s and 1990s, development became more fashionable, probably as a result of serious theorists taking a look at development problems. Two well-known examples are Akerlof (1976), wrote about castes, and Stiglitz (1974), who wrote about sharecropping (if I recall correctly, both those articles were the result of Akerlof and Stiglitz spending time in India sabbatical).
In the late 1990s, development was still very theoretical. To be fair, there were some empirical micro papers wherever and whenever people could get their hands on data or collect their own. In most cases, if you wanted to do empirical work, you had to work at the World Bank and get a first pass at the data they collected or go and collect your own data yourself.3
(Looking at old issues of the Journal of Development Economics, there was also a lot of development macro back then as well, but I am not qualified to talk about that.)
It was against that backdrop that I applied to graduate school. I applied to two Canadian economics departments (UBC, where I was planning on doing theoretical development economics, and Queen’s, where I was planning on doing econometrics). But given my interest in applied econometrics, my Master’s advisor suggested that I apply to Berkeley’s agricultural and resource economics PhD, since Alain de Janvry and Élisabeth Sadoulet were there doing empirical development microeconomics, which would marry both of my research interests. Talking to a Berkeley ARE grad student who was a Montreal alum, she suggested I also apply to Cornell’s agricultural and resource economics PhD, where I ended up going.
The status quo back then, as I understand it, was this: If you wanted to do empirical micro development, you either had to go to a top-five economics department (because within economics, development was viewed as a luxury good), or you went to one of a number of agricultural economics department (because agricultural economics department had a history of working on empirical development issues as a result of PL-480, or the Food for Peace program, which originated with Minnesota Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, and which was directly about agricultural development).
When I write that “within economics, development was viewed as a luxury good,” I am not joking. In 2003, my best friend from grad-school accepted an offer from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville’s economics department. After he started, I jokingly mentioned to him that it would be nice if his department were to hire in development and we could work in the same department, to which he replied “Man, we can dream, but we’ll never hire in development!” The implicit assumption was “We do not have that kind of resources,” and not because development economists were expensive but because development was not a priority at all for department outside of the top tier.
But soon thereafter, development economics became cool, and departments at all levels of quality started asking for and getting lines to hire development economists. Credit where credit is due: if I had to guess, I’d say that that mid-to-late-2000s rise in popularity was due both to the work of the early randomistas as well as to Muhammad Yunus winning a Nobel peace prize for microfinance. And as I mentioned in my last post, the 2019 Nobel is certainly responsible for sealing the deal on the respectability of development within economics.
What I am saying here is that with the Credibility Revolution and with the early randomized controlled trials (RCTs), the value proposition of development economics became obvious to economics departments as early as around 2006-2010, probably because many of the questions answered by those early RCTs were about questions posed in other fields.
With that, old-school economists likely began seeing that development economists were people they could talk to and work with. Miguel and Kremer (2004) is a great example of that: Yes, it’s a development paper, but it touches upon education economics, health economics, and even public economics in that it identifies an important positive externality.
These days, development economists are ubiquitous, and found well outside of the top-tier4 not just in economics and agricultural economics departments, but also in business schools and policy schools.
Does Agricultural Economics Need Development Economics?
Which brings me to my core point: Is there still a place for development economics in agricultural economics qua a distinct discipline?
By “is there still a place,” I am not talking about people who are already faculty or graduate students doing development in agricultural economics departments. Of course, those people have their place!
Rather, I am looking to the future by asking two questions I will tackle in the remainder of this post:
- Should agricultural economics departments argue for hiring lines in development?, and
- Should those departments admit graduate students to work on development topics?
In light of my last post, I think the answer is “Probably not, except for a handful of departments who can easily get hiring lines.”
In that post, I observed that development had gone from being a clearly defined field whose objective was to study the market failures that enable persistent poverty to become about anything and everything, and that while there was a time when people were just development economists, nowadays doing development economics means being a development-and-x economist, where x can be almost any other field (e.g., agricultural, environmental, health, labor economics).
But if “development economics” is decreasingly useful as a concept (and faculty positions are increasingly difficult to get for job-market candidates because the field is extremely crowded), then it stands to reason that people should probably pick an x that they like, invest in becoming the best x economist they can be, and apply their skills to low- and middle-income country (LMIC) contexts if and when the research question at hand demands it.
There is also something else going on at the macro and policy levels, viz. the mission creep that has characterized international development policy over the last 75 years. This is something I criticized about 10 years ago in a piece written for Foreign Affairs titled “Development Bloat” (gated; email me for a pdf) in which I wrote:
Within the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, there are 169 targets are spread out over 17 goals. A quick look at what those goals and targets are indicates that we have come a (perhaps too) long way from the Food for Peace Program. As a result, “international development” has become considerably less in line with what differentiates agricultural economics qua a discipline from economics.
It follows that, except for a handful of departments who have significantly more resources than others (hello, Dyson!) hiring in development may not be the best investment for agricultural economics departments.
Rather, those departments should invest in hiring faculty who are working on themes relevant to stakeholders in colleges of agriculture (to only name a few: food security and nutrition, food markets, the environment, natural resources, agricultural policy) who, when the research question demands it, also have the ability to work in an LMIC context.
There is also a broader reason not to invest in development: The incoming US administration is likely to make deep cuts to foreign aid budges, which means that international development efforts are on the chopping block. This means that we might have to kiss federal funding for development policy research and other “development innovation labs” goodbye.
How about graduate students? I often tell graduate students in the first two years of our program that they are welcome to work on anything that strikes their fancy; it is their PhD, and they shouldn’t let anyone tell them what to make of it, least of all the shining example of survivor bias that I am.
“But,” I immediately add, “if you want to have a shot at a faculty position at a research university, you should be working on things that are of direct relevance to the stakeholders in colleges of agriculture, as departments located in other colleges of agriculuture (i.e., agricultural and resouce economics departments) are our natural market.5 If you work on something like development and labor, our department is way, way down the list of places another department looks at when hiring in that area. People hiring in development and labor will look at candidates from about 250 other departments before they look at us. But ag econ departments? We definitely are in the top five to ten places they will turn to.”
In other words, instead of trying to compete with economics departments, agricultural economics departments need to rediscover their comparative advantage and, when hiring, play to that comparative advantage, especially in cases where hiring lines are few and far between. Similarly, the basic laws of marketing suggest future faculty in agricultural economics would do well not to try to emulate what people in economics department do, but find a way to differentiate themselves. How they should do that will likely be the subject of another post.
- This is not always true. At some institutions (e.g., Iowa State, NC State, Washington State), the agricultural economics and economics departments have been combined into one economics department. ↩︎
- Here is exhibit A for how the mighty have fallen. Also, and again because the modal
AmericanInternet reader takes everything in the most literal sense possible: Unlike those “serious” economists from the 1970s, I do not think other social sciences have any less standing than economics. ↩︎ - When I was an MSc student in 2000, I told my thesis advisor that I wanted to work on credit rationing, ideally in Morocco. A few weeks later he sent me data he had gotten from a Moroccan contact for a survey of micro-enterprises in Casablanca that included a series of questions on credit and loan applications: whether they were approved or denied, at which interest rate they were approved when approved, etc. It took me years to realize how lucky I had been then. ↩︎
- That includes the University of Tennessee. But remember: “We’ll never hire in development!” ↩︎
- Our department is in the College of Food, Agriculture and Natural Resource Sciences at the University of Minnesota, and it is formerly the Department of Agricultural Economics. In a future post, I might tackle how the “applied” in “agricultural and applied economics” may no longer be useful. ↩︎