World Perspectives

Farm or Be Taxed in Africa

A dead economist’s ideas are alive and well in ag policy debate.   Many policy ideas, especially related to taxation, are attributed to “dead economists.” One of the pioneers in tax theory fitting this mold is Arthur Pigou, an unlikely influencer on agricultural and food policy. That point was driven home yesterday by a speech at Iowa State University given by African Development Bank President Akinwumi Adesina, the former agriculture minister of Nigeria who will be presented with the 2017 World Food Prize this week at the Iowa Hunger Summit. First, however, who was Pigou? He was a British economist who followed up on his Cambridge professor’s work in defining “externalities,” or what introductory...

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Illuminating the value of technical research

On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.

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