Vernon Wesley Ruttan

Vernon Wesley Ruttan (1924–2008) was a development economist at the University of Minnesota, where he was Regents Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Economics and Applied Economics. Ruttan's research focused on agricultural development, induced innovation, technical change and productivity growth, institutions, and development assistance policy. His book with Yujiro Hayami, Agricultural Development: An International Perspective was considered a classic in the field and was translated into four other languages.

At the University of Chicago, Ruttan studied with Theodore Schultz, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1979.

Ruttan held positions earlier in his career at the Tennessee Valley Authority, Purdue University, the President's Council of Economic Advisors, the Rockefeller Foundation at the International Rice Research Institute in The Philippines, and President of the Agricultural Development Council.

Government investment in general purpose technology

In his book, Is War Necessary for Economic Growth? (2006), Ruttan argues that large scale and long term government investment is necessary for the development of general purpose technologies and economic growth. He analyzed the development of six different technology complexes and concluded that government investments have been important in speeding up the development of all of these, and that nuclear power would, most probably, not have been developed at all in the absence of large government investments in development.

The six technologies that were analyzed by Ruttan are:

American production system airplane technologies space technologies IT technologies Internet technologies nuclear power

Honors

Ruttan was a Fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected as a member in the National Academy of Sciences in 1990.

Hayami, Yujiro and Vernon W. Ruttan. "Toward a Theory of Induced Institutional Innovation," Journal of Development Studies, 20(1984): 203–223. Hayami, Yujiro and Vernon W. Ruttan. "Agricultural Productivity Differences Among Countries," American Economic Review, 60(1970): 895–911. Evenson, R., P.E. Waggoner, and V.W. Ruttan. "Economic Benefits from Research: An Example from Agriculture," Science, 205(1979): 1101–1107. Ruttan, Vernon W. "Induced Innovation, Evolutionary Theory and Path Dependence: Sources of Technical Change," Economic Journal, 107(1997): 1520–1529. Ruttan, Vernon W. "The New Growth Theory and Development Economics: A Survey," Journal of Development Studies, 35(1998): 1-26. Kawagoe, T., Y. Hayami, and V, Ruttan. "The Intercountry Agricultural Production Function and Productivity Differences Among Countries," Journal of Development Economics, 17(1985): 113–132. Ruttan, Vernon W. "The Green Revolution: Seven Generalizations," International Development Review, 19(1977): 16–23. Ruttan, Vernon W. "Usher and Schumpeter on Invention, Innovation, and Technological Change," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 73(1959): 596–606. Ruttan, Vernon W. "Productivity Growth in World Agriculture: Sources and Constraints," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16(2002): 161–184. Ruttan, Vernon W. "What Happened to Technology Adoption-Diffusion Research?" Sociologia Ruralis, 36(1996): 51–73.