We examine the contribution of trade to the rise of modern agriculture, taking into account interactions between trade, input requirements, and technology adoption. We develop and estimate a new multi-country general equilibrium model that incorporates producers' choices of which crops to produce and with which technologies, at the level of grid-cells covering the Earth's surface. We find that trade cost reductions in agricul-tural inputs and the international transmission of productivity growth in the agricul-tural input sector since the 1980s induced large shifts from traditional, labor-intensive technologies to modern, input-intensive ones, with important global and distributional implications for productivity and welfare.
STEG Working Paper