Description
Book SynopsisResources for agricultural science are scarce across the world. Yet even as resources are shrinking, agricultural science has expanded its inquiry into many new areas - such as environmental preservation, food quality, and rural development - without forsaking its more traditional concerns. In a time of tight government budgets, research administrators are faced with the need to provide strong evidence that costs are justified by benefits.
Science under Scarcity is an invaluable guide to the theory and methods necessary for evaluating research in agriculture and for setting priorities for resource allocation. Although economists have made significant progress in developing more sophisticated methods for research evaluation and priority setting, many research analysts and administrators do not have a working knowledge of those practices. Without the assistance of formal economic analysis it is particularly difficult to assess the social value of new technologies or to make inform
Table of Contents1: Institutional and Conceptual Framework 2: The Institutional, Scientific and Policy Contexts 3: Research Evaluation and Priority-Setting Research 4: Measuring the Effects of Agricultural Research 5: Econometric Measurement of the Effects of Research 6: Economic Surplus Methods 7: Evaluation and Priority Setting in Practice 8: Economic Surplus Measurement and Application 9: Mathematic Programming 10: Scoring and Other Shortcut Approaches 11: Overview and Assessment 12: Assessment and Conclusion
