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Abstract
Agricultural shares of output and employment in thirteen Pacific basin countries
are analyzed with reference to a global baseline for 1980. Per-capita output
parity ratios are lower in the ASEAN, ANICs, and Japan as compared to their
trading partners in North America and Oceania. Wide differences in land-labor
ratios influence the directions of technological change, economies of scale, and
dynamic comparative advantage. Differential changes in the partial productivities
of land and labor between the high and middle income economies suggest
that there has been a narrowing of the gap in land productivities and a widening
of the gap in labor productivities across the Pacific. The implication is that there
has been a regressive international impact on wages for farm labor. Further, since
agriculture's share of land resources does not tend to fall as fast as its share of
output and labor, increasing structural imbalance in terms of differential land
rents to agriculture vis-a-vis non-agriculture results in greater adjustment pressures
on the property and derived institutional systems that control natural
resource allocation decisions. The results are consistent with the heavy adjustment
burdens that agriculture and developing economies have been bearing as a
result of expanding trade and capital flows, and the need to focus more attention
on the structure, functioning, and performance of the different institutional systems
that control resource allocation decisions in these countries.