The Scandinavian Economic History Review invites submissions for a special issue on ‘Agriculture and Economic Development’. A full description of the topic and suggested areas for contributions is below. Potential contributors are encouraged to contact the editor responsible, Professor Paul Sharp (University of Southern Denmark, [email protected]) to discuss their topics and approach in advance of the deadline.
The deadline for submissions is November 30, 2019.
Please note in addition, that the Scandinavian Economic History Review (SEHR) is offering the possibility for participants at the conference on ‘Dynamics, Economic Growth, and International Trade, DEGIT – XXIV’ in Odense, Denmark from August 22–23, 2019 (see http://degit.sam.sdu.dk/) to submit their papers for fast track consideration for the special issue. The special issue will consist of five to six individual papers, subjected to blind peer review and will also be edited by Paul Sharp. All contributions should be based on original new research and will be subject to normal peer-review process. Papers submitted by November 30, 2019 to the SEHR online submission platform (https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/sehr20) will receive initial decisions by the end of February 2020. Please note in your cover letter than you presented at the DEGIT XXIV conference, and wish to be considered for the fast track.
Agriculture and Economic development
Agriculture plays a central role in economic history, and in fact it is only very recently that most of the world population has lived in cities. It is often assigned a rather passive role for development, however. For example, Lewis (Citation1954) classic two-sector growth model suggests that agriculture is able to release labour to more dynamic sectors of the economy, without impacting on production. Likewise, Johnston and Mellor (Citation1961) presented a number of ways in which agriculture could aid development by gradually receding in importance, for example by saving to aid investment in the cities, and generating export income to allow for the import of modern technology. Moreover, Prebisch (Citation1950) and Singer (Citation1950) argued that a specialisation in primary products was dangerous if the terms of trade turned against producers. More recent work has, however, presented agriculture in a more favourable and dynamic light: see for example Overton (Citation1996) on the English Agricultural Revolution, Olmstead and Rhode (Citation2008) on American agriculture, Lampe and Sharp (Citation2018) on the transformation of Danish dairying, and Evenson and Gollin (Citation2003), and Gollin, Hansen, and Wingender (Citation2016) on the Green Revolution. This special issue invites contributions which assess the role of agriculture for development, both for example through its impact on long-run comparative development, and in terms of short-run technological and institutional change.
In terms of comparative development, Diamond (Citation1997) for example argued that Eurasia enjoyed a number of advantages which meant that agricultural innovations spread faster in that continent after the Neolithic Revolution. Economists since Malthus have argued about the importance of land as a binding constraint on growth, and Unified Growth Theory argues that the Malthusian mechanism is key to understanding agriculture and development (Ashraf & Galor, Citation2011), although Federico (Citation2005) explains that only between eighty and ninety percent of all cultivable land is in use today. Galor and Özak (Citation2016) have argued that agricultural productivity has been fundamental in affecting growth and development through differential effects on time preferences. Recent contributions on agriculture and technological change include Nunn and Qian (Citation2011) on the introduction of the potato to the Old World, and Andersen, Jensen, and Skovsgaard (Citation2016) on the impact of the heavy plough in the Middle Ages. Examples of important institutional developments might include land reform (Banerjee & Iyer, Citation2005), serfdom (Markevich & Zhuravskaya, Citation2018), trade policy (O'Rourke & Williamson, Citation2001), and cooperation (Beltrán Tapia, Citation2012).
Finally, there are many potential, relatively unexplored avenues for future work on the role of agriculture for development, for example in terms of the environmental costs of agricultural intensification (see Sharp, Citation2018 for more discussion of this). Given the historical and present-day importance of the sector, the editors of the Scandinavian Economic History Review are looking forward to a wide range of innovative studies on any aspect of the role of agriculture for economic development.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
References
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- Singer, H. W. (1950). The Distribution of Gains between Investing and Borrowing Countries. American Economic Review, 40, 473–485.