AAEA members present research at ASSA
MILWAUKEE, Dec. 17, 2025 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- AAEA invites media to attend their sessions at the ASSA 2026 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, PA.
On Monday, January 5, 2026 at 10:15 am – 12:15 pm (EST) at the Marriott Philadelphia Downtown, three AAEA members will speak at the session "Work and Earnings in Agrifood Value Chains Around the World"
Presentations in this session include (speakers are listed first):
Measuring Employment and Job Quality in Agrifood Systems: A Comprehensive Approach
- Erwin Corong, Purdue University
- Madhur Gautam, IFPRI
- Will Martin, IFPRI
- Rob Vos, IFPRI
As the agricultural transformation associated with economic development proceeds, the economic fulcrum of the agrifood system moves from on-farm, or primary, production activities to activities that are increasingly non-farm sector based, such as agroprocessing, food services, wholesale and retail trade, etc. As a consequence, the traditional measures of farm employment and value-addition (or GDP) come to represent a smaller and smaller share of the total contribution of the agrifood system. Better quantification is important not only to appreciate the transformation within the agrifood system with economic development, but also to inform better policies and strategies to create more and better-quality jobs and accelerate structural transformation in developing economies. There are two broad approaches to measuring the size of the agrifood sector—tracking activity in agrifood sectors; and exploiting the full structure of the economy to assess the direct and indirect employment required to meet final demand for agrifood products. Both of these approaches are used in an analysis based on the global GTAP database and their results compared. The findings suggest that the final demand approach provides a more comprehensive assessment of the economic activities needed to meet final demand, with agrifood sector accounting for a much larger share of GDP, and the broader agrifood sector generating more and better-quality skilled jobs for both male and female workers.
Understanding Agrifood Value Chain Labor Dynamics
- Jing Yi, University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Miguel Gόmez, Cornell University
- Pat Canning, Cornell University
- Christopher Barrett, Cornell University
The structural transformation of agrifood value chains (AVCs) arises through a combination of technological and institutional changes and growth and shifts in consumer demand that arise as incomes grow and populations urbanize. Over the course of AVC structural transformation, old jobs disappear, new ones get created, and relative compensation adjusts. Yet relatively little is understood about this process, especially over extended periods or at global scale. This paper studies patterns of change in AVC employment and labor compensation. We use a new, global data set on labor value addition, employment, and average worker compensation within AVCs by country, year, and final consumer sub-market – domestic retail (i.e., food at home), domestic food service (i.e., food away from home), and international export (i.e., retail plus food service across all foreign markets) – for each of six distinct AVC industries (primary production, food manufacturing, transportation, wholesale, retail, food service), 1993-2021. We decompose observed changes in employment and average annual worker compensation within countries' AVCs into several component parts: changes in labor intensity/productivity within a given AVC industry, changes in the direct input requirements of the overall economy (i.e., in the technical coefficients that map intersectoral monetary flows to sector-specific outputs), changes in the composition of final consumer demand (e.g., food at home versus food away from home, export versus domestic markets), and changes in total final consumer expenditures. The former two phenomena reflect technological and institutional change that affects labor use within the AVC, the latter two reflect the shifting composition and absolute level of consumer food demand. One might reasonably expect different factors to be more or less important at different stages of national income growth, in different regions, and for different markets or industries. We supplement global scale analysis with case studies of several countries from different regions and incomes.
Measuring Agrifood Systems: New Indicators and Global Estimates
- James Thurlow, IFPRI
- Brian Holtemeyer, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
- Shiyun Jiang, IFPRI
- Karl Pauw, IFPRI
- Josee Randriamamonjy, IFPRI
Transformation of the agrifood system is a cornerstone of many governments' national development plans. This reflects the importance of agrifood systems for the livelihoods and wellbeing of poor populations as well as the continued strong association of agricultural transformation with longer-term economic development and structural change. Agrifood transformation is also key to healthier diets and more sustainable production systems. However, adopting an agrifood system perspective is not trivial – it requires looking "beyond agriculture" when prioritizing policies and tracking outcomes by also considering upstream and downstream agrifood-related activities, such as agro-processing and food distribution. Measuring transformation therefore requires economywide data and innovative metrics. This study introduces two such metrics – AgGDP+, which captures the total value-added across the on- and off-farm sectors of the agrifood system, and AgEMP+, which reflects the employment generated across its various components. It further explains how consistent estimates of AgGDP+ and AgEMP+ were produced for 217 countries over the period 2000–2021 and demonstrates how this Agri-Food System Dashboard – a publicly available resource – can be used to monitor transformation, prioritize investments, and better understand.
If you are interested in complimentary press pass for ASSA, please contact Paityn Connolly at [email protected].
ABOUT AAEA: Established in 1910, the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association (AAEA) is the leading professional association for agricultural and applied economists, with 2,500 members in more than 60 countries. Members of the AAEA work in academic or government institutions as well as in industry and not-for-profit organizations, and engage in a variety of research, teaching, and outreach activities in the areas of agriculture, the environment, food, health, and international development. The AAEA publishes three journals, the Journal of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (an open access journal), the American Journal of Agricultural Economics and Applied Economic Perspectives & Policy, as well as the online magazine Choices and the online open access publication series Applied Economics Teaching Resources. To learn more, visit http://www.aaea.org.
Media Contact
Allison Ware, Agricultural & Applied Economics Association, 414-918-3190, [email protected], www.aaea.org
SOURCE Agricultural & Applied Economics Association
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