That’s the title of a paper by Douglas Gollin, Casper Hansen, and Asger Wingender just published in the Journal of Political Economy (an earlier ungated version is here). It’s unusual to find a paper focused on a core agricultural and farming question published in one of the top general interest economics journals, but I suspect the magnitude of the effects are so large, it’s hard to ignore. Here’s the abstract:
“We estimate the impact of the Green Revolution in the developing world by exploiting exogenous heterogeneity in the timing and extent of the benefits derived from high-yielding crop varieties (HYVs). We find that HYVs increased yields by 44% between 1965 and 2010, with further gains coming through reallocation of inputs. Higher yields increased income and reduced population growth. A 10-year delay of the Green Revolution would in 2010 have cost 17% of GDP (gross domestic product) per capita and added 223 million people to the developing-world population. The cumulative GDP loss over 45 years would have been US$83 trillion, corresponding to approximately one year of current global GDP.”