Is agricultural productivity conducive to economic development? We develop a two-country open-economy Schumpeterian growth model with endogenous takeoff. With both agricultural trade and a subsistence requirement, higher domestic agricultural productivity has ambiguous effects on the economy's takeoff and its transitional growth rate if domestic and imported agricultural goods are substitutes. Without the subsistence requirement, higher domestic agricultural productivity delays industrialization and lowers transitional growth by increasing domestic demand for agricultural labor. This specialization force works in the opposite direction of the change in domestic consumption pattern governed by the subsistence requirement, which tends to release labor from agriculture. Without agricultural trade, the specialization force is absent and the subsistence requirement on agricultural consumption implies that higher domestic agricultural productivity reallocates labor from agriculture to industry, hastening industrialization and raising transitional growth. Using cross-country panel data, we find that agricultural productivity has a positive effect on economic growth but this positive effect weakens and even becomes negative when reliance on agricultural imports is sufficiently high. Simulating the calibrated model, we find that improvement in domestic agricultural productivity accounts for about 30% and 15% of the changes in TFP growth in China and Japan, respectively, and more so for their main trading partner, the United States.
