FINANCING AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH-AND-DEVELOPMENT IN RICH COUNTRIES - WHATS HAPPENING AND WHY

Governments everywhere are trimming their support for agricultural R&D , giving greater scrutiny to the support that they do provide, and ref orming the public agencies that fund, oversee, and carry out the resea rch. This represents a break from previous patterns, which had consist ed of expansion in the public funds for agricultural R&D. Private-sect or spending on agricultural research has slowed along with the growth of public spending in recent years, but the balance continues to shift towards the private sector. This article presents a quantitative revi ew of these funding trends and the considerable institutional changes that have accompanied them. We discuss new data for 22 OECD countries, providing institutional details for five of these countries, and conc lude with an assessment of policy developments.