Keith Fuglie

Keith Fuglie is a senior economist with the USDA’s Economic Research Service. His work focuses on the economics of agricultural technical and productivity change, and how it is influenced by agricultural policies and investments in research and development (R&D). As an employee of a federal statistical agency, an important component of Keith’s work has been the creation and improvement of agricultural economic datasets for use in research and policy analysis. He created the ERS public database on International Agricultural Productivity, which provides indexes of agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) for more than 170 countries and regions world-wide. He has also produced detailed data series on private R&D investment by U.S. and global agricultural input and food industries as well as public agricultural R&D spending in the U.S.  His research has explored both the causes and consequences of agricultural productivity growth, including how it influences food security, the use of environmental resources and greenhouse gas emissions.  Over the course of his career Keith has produced more than 165 publications, including 56 peer-reviewed journal articles and 34 ERS reports. 

While based with ERS in Washington DC, Keith has worked closely with the other USDA agencies, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and other national and international organizations. He was lead author of the 2019 World Bank flagship report, Harvesting Prosperity: Technology and Productivity Growth in Agriculture, which describes strategies for low income countries to raise agricultural productivity and create pathways for food security and equitable economic growth.  He also co-edited the 2012 volume on Productivity Growth in Agriculture: and International Perspective, which brought together new evidence on the causes and consequences of agricultural technical change around the world.  Earlier in his career Keith spent a year as senior staff economist on the White House Council of Economic Advisors and 10 years with the International Potato Center (CIP) based in Southeast Asia and North Africa, where he served as CIP’s regional representative in Asia and head of social sciences.

Keith is recognized as a leading expert on U.S. and international agricultural productivity growth and its implications for policy. He has twice been recipient -- in 2012 and 2022-- of the USDA’s highest decoration for professional excellence, the Secretary’s Honor Award. In 2014 he received the AAEA Bruce Gardner Memorial Prize for Applied Policy Analysis, and in 2020, was named an Honorary Life Member of the International Association of Agricultural Economists in recognition of his career contributions to understanding  technological change and growth in international agriculture. In 2022 Keith received the Alumni Achievement Award from Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota.

Originally from northwestern Minnesota, Keith spent much of his youth in Africa where his father was an agricultural economist with USAID. Some of his earliest memories are accompanying his father on farm visits and technology demonstration trials in rural Minnesota and Nigeria. After receiving a B.A. from Concordia College in 1982, Keith went on to earn an M.S. and Ph.D. in Agricultural and Applied Economics from the University of Minnesota, where Vernon W. Ruttan served as his thesis adviser. Following his graduate studies, Keith spent 1990-1991 as a Rockefeller Foundation post-doctorate research fellow with CIP in Tunisia.