Two blades of grass: the impact of the Green Revolution

Abstract

Two Blades of Grass: The Impact of the Green Revolution examines how the Green Revolution affected economies in the developing world by exploiting exogenous heterogeneity in the timing and extent of the benefits derived from high-yielding crop varieties (HYVs). HYVs increased yields by 44% between 1965 and 2010, with further gains coming through reallocation of land and labor. Beyond agriculture, our baseline estimates show strong, positive, and robust impacts of the Green Revolution on different measures of economic development. Most strikingly, the income loss would have been US$1,273 (adjusted for PPP) across our sample of countries. By 2010, the cumulative global loss of GDP of delaying the Green Revolution 10 years would have been about US$83 trillion—roughly a year of present-day global GDP. Despite these reservations, the results of this paper clearly place the Green Revolution among the most important economic events in the twentieth century, and possibly in modern history. – AI-generated abstract.