R&D Investments, technology spillovers and agricultural productivity, case of the Czech Republic

The objective of the paper is to quantify the effect of the R&D investments on agricultural productivity in the Czech Republic using the co-integration analysis. The effect of the R&D investments is measured by a knowledge stock constructed using a gamma distribution with lags ranging from 7 to 15 years. The relationship between the total factor productivity in agriculture, the domestic knowledge stock and the foreign R&D spillovers approximated by the imports of agricultural technologies is examined using an error correction model. Whereas the estimates confirm that domestic research plays a positive role in agricultural productivity, the results for the foreign R&D spillovers are rather weak. Furthermore, there is little evidence that either length of time or the functional form of weights plays a major role in assessing the dependence of the productivity on R&D investments; however, the models with the knowledge distribution lags longer than 7 years perform better.