Scale, Size, Technology And Structure: A Personal Perspective

In these notes, I first discuss some recent perspectives on the relationship between technical change and economies of scale. I then discuss the issues of scale economies from the perspective of the Hayami-Ruttan work on induced innovation. In the third section, I raise the question of why farms are so small. I then tum to the issue of potential technological constraints on labor and land productivity. In a final section, I raise several questions about research on farm structure.