The Agrarian Origins of the Economic Growth of Nations

该项目旨在通过使用历史证据来记录早期历史时期成功的经济发展者实际使用的增长战略，从而提高贫穷国家的经济增长率并降低全球贫困水平。大多数成功的开发商，特别是美国、加拿大、澳大利亚、瑞士、法国和斯堪的纳维亚，都是在强大的农业基础上取得成功的。强大农业的一个关键组成部分是提高产品质量，但迄今为止，质量是通过任何特定国家出口农产品的数量或数量来衡量的。我们通过对1870-1950年世界各国经济发展的统计分析来考察农业的增长之路。我们加入了一项衡量农业卓越程度的新标准，即由美食家和家庭经济学家等食品专家对一个国家产品的认可度。我们对五个国家（美国、英国、法国、德国和意大利）的购物指南和烹饪书进行了内容分析，以获得有关这些国家的产品是否被视为优质或劣质的统计指标。然后，我们将这些卓越指标与农业贸易模式和经济增长联系起来。农业优势反过来又与社会结构的其他指标相关，如土地所有制模式和教育水平。该项目的总体目标是评估农产品质量对发达国家经济增长的促进作用，并希望帮助其他国家建立成功的制度，将本国农业部门转变为长期可持续增长的引擎。

This project is designed to increase the rates of economic growth in poor nations and reduce levels of global poverty by using historical evidence to document the strategies of growth that were actually used by successful economic developers in earlier historical periods. Most successful developers, notably the U.S., Canada, Australia, Switzerland, France and Scandinavia, achieved their success on the basis of robust agriculture. A critical component of robust agriculture is improving product quality but, to date, quality has been measured through the volume or quantity of agricultural goods exported by any given nation. We examine the agrarian path to growth by statistical analysis of economic development in the nations of the world 1870-1950. We include a new measure of excellence in agriculture, approval ratings of a nation's products by experts on food such as gourmets and home economists. We use a content analysis of shoppers' guides and cookbooks in five nations (United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy) to obtain statistical indicators of whether nations are viewed as having superior or inferior products. We then correlate these excellence measures with both agricultural trade patterns and economic growth. Agricultural excellence is in turn correlated with other measures of social structure such as land tenure patterns and education levels. The overall goal of the project is to assess the role that agricultural product quality had in promoting economic growth in advanced nations with the hope of helping other nations develop successful institutions for converting their own agricultural sectors into engines for long-term, sustainable growth.