Abstract
Agricultural economics arose in the late 19th century, combined the theory of the firm with marketing and organization theory, and developed throughout the 20th century largely as an empirical branch of general economics. This emphasis was due to the historical importance of agriculture, and in the United States was made possible by the rich data compiled by the US Department of Agriculture beginning in the mid-19th century. The discipline was closely linked to empirical applications of mathematical statistics and made early and significant contributions to econometric methods. From the 1960s on, as agricultural sectors in the OECD countries contracted, agricultural economists were drawn to the development problems of poor countries, to the trade and macroeconomic policy implications of agriculture in richer countries, and to a variety of issues in production, consumption, environmental and resource economics. This ramified the subject and enlarged its international focus, at the same time as its microeconomic, empirical and policy orientation distanced it from developments in general equilibrium theory, macroeconomic modelling, game theory and axiomatic social choice, which preoccupied many departments of economics throughout the late 20th century.
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Runge, C.F. (2008). Agricultural Economics. In: Durlauf, S.N., Blume, L.E. (eds) The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-58802-2_21
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