Between data and decisions: the organization of agricultural economic information systems

In the current political economic environment there is pressure to reduce a nd reorient public agency involvement in agricultural economic research and information services. Efforts to evaluate the effectiveness of public inve stments and enhance sectoral coherence through exploitation of institutiona l complementarity are constrained by weak understanding of how economic inf ormation is produced, processed and circulated. In this paper, we locate th e centers of analytic competence and analyze supply of agricultural economi c advisory services through development of an information accounting framew ork. We focus on the relative contributions of public agencies, commercial firms, collective organizations, and informal networks in order to identify organizational structures and institutional arrangements of coordination i n the agricultural economy. The observed division of labor in information s ystems reflects the heterogeneous distribution and strategic choices of act ors with respect to internal analytic competencies. Decision makers in agri cultural businesses are heavily dependent on the services of a diverse rang e of intermediaries who perform information translation and customization f unctions. These intermediaries rely heavily on largely, but not exclusively , publicly supplied data and information inputs. This strongly linear aspec t of agricultural economic information systems is identified as a component subsystem within the larger and more highly interconnected system of innov ation. The dominant role of public agencies in economic information systems suggests that they currently perform highly valuable coordinating function s in agriculture. While commercial and collective organizations make import ant contributions and could be mobilized to assume broader responsibility, there are Likely to be Limitations to substitutability based on the classic (but still fully relevant) problem of private underinvestment in informati on. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.