An economic evaluation of cotton and peanut research in southeastern United States

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to utilize the economic surplus framework for evaluating the impact of investment in agricultural research. The economic impact measures used in this study are the total benefits and distribution of those benefits associated with investment in agricultural research. These results are used to calculate an internal rate of return on the investments. The focus of the research is on cotton and peanuts in the Southeast region of the United States. Two equations are estimated to determine the impacts of the money being spent on the research efforts of these two commodities.|The results reveal the positive benefits to consumers and producers exceed the investment amount in a present value sense. Total social benefits average about 201 million dollars (1982 dollars) annually for cotton research and about 191 million from peanut research. The internal rates of return were 53.58 percent for cotton and 23.87 percent for peanuts, suggesting that past research investments produced a high return to society. These results generally agree with the results of other similar studies.