Marc F. Bellemare Posts

From the ISI Web of Knowledge Journal Citations Report, here is the new top 5 of agricultural economics journals:

1. Food Policy 2.044
2. Agricultural Economics 1.739
3. Journal of Agricultural Economics 1.545
4. European Review of Agricultural Economics 1.544
5. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 1.436

The number to the right of each journal name is the journal’s impact factor, which has been calculated on the basis of calendar year 2015 citation numbers.

This been a good year for agricultural economics journals–both Food Policy, which I edit, and the American Journal of Agricultural Economics (AJAE) at which I used to serve as associate editor, have seen their impact factor go up. One notable absence from the top 5 this year is the journal Food Security, which was ranked #2 last year.

Obviously, I am pleased that (i) our impact factor went up and (ii) we are ranked first in my discipline. All the credit goes to my co-editor Mario Mazzocchi, our associate editors, who also handle a lot of manuscripts, and the Elsevier staff we work with.

Again, that is only one top 5. The rank ordering might differ significantly depending on what other indicators of quality you look at, or whether you consider reputation. In agricultural and applied economics departments, for example, many still consider the AJAE the no-contest top journal in the field, no matter what impact factors say.

Update: Mario also informs me that Food Policy ranks 49th in economics, a category where there is a lot of serious competition.

It’s always a good day when a leading media outlet picks up some of my research. It does not get much better than when The Economist does so.

From an article in this week’s issue:

The 2016 MidDev conference, which my colleague Paul Glewwe organizes here at the University of Minnesota every other year, is almost upon us.

One of the papers I am most looking forward to seeing presented at the conference is a new paper on the inverse farm size-productivity relationship by Leah Bevis and Chris Barrett, which Leah will be presenting on Saturday morning in an organized session on agriculture in developing countries.

Briefly, for those of you who may not be familiar with it, the inverse farm size-productivity relationship is the empirical regularity whereby smaller farms are on average more productive than larger farms in developing countries. (Here, note that “productivity” refers to the amount produced per unit of land–kilograms of rice per hectare, for example–and not the total amount harvested.)

The existence of that inverse relationship has preoccupied economists for almost 100 years now, and many have tried to explain how and why it arises. If there truly is an inverse relationship, then this is at odds with neoclassical economic theory, according to which we would expect low-productivity producers to sell or lease their plots to high-productivity producers.

Moreover, if there truly is an inverse relationship, then the obvious policy recommendation for anyone interested in improving food security is to break up larger farms into smaller ones.