The Economic Effects of Research-led Agricultural Development Assistance: The Case of Korean Programs on International Agriculture

Abstract

South Korea’s Rural Development Administration embarked on the Korean Programs on International Agriculture (KOPIA) in six developing countries for agricultural development assistance in 2009, and the programs were undertaken in 21 countries in 2018. The purposes of the KOPIA are to introduce new agricultural technologies by cooperative research and development, and to extend developed technologies to farmers and agricultural businesses. In this paper, the economic effects of the KOPIA are estimated in 23 recipient countries in terms of their production and value-added inducement effect. In doing so, the inter-industry relation analysis method is used with an input-output table for each country from the Eora multi-region input-output (Eora MRIO) database. From the analysis between 2009 and 2017, the production inducement effect (PIE) by the KOPIA in the 23 countries is estimated to total US$99 million, accounting for 1.7 times its total budget of US$58.9 million, and the value-added inducement effect (VIE) in the 13 countries is estimated to total US$23.9 million. More importantly, the PIE and VIE continue to be higher in some countries, and the annual VIE tends to increase in most of the countries. These findings imply that the research-led KOPIA has contributed to agricultural development and further economic growth through inter-industrial relations in the recipients.