How Agriculture’s Role Changes as Countries Develop

Assignment Name: Storytelling with Open Data

Vaishnavi Prakash Lokhande
Student ID: s4110804

June 11, 2025

Introduction — Understanding the Role of Agriculture in Development

Global Summary – Bar Chart by Income Group

  • Low income countries rely on agriculture — nearly 30% of their national income comes from agriculture.
  • Lower-middle income countries show a notable drop, likely due to industrial transition.
  • Upper-middle and high-income countries have much lower reliance — 8% and 3%, respectively.
  • In wealthy nations, agriculture is efficient and subsidized, but GDP is driven by services, technology, and industry.

Global Time Series Line Chart

  • The global agricultural percentage of GDP dropped from around 18% in the early 1990s to below 10% by 2023.
  • This trend indicates that more countries are transitioning away from an agricultural-based economy towards industry and service sectors.
  • A decline in the agricultural GDP percentage does not mean that agriculture is shrinking, but rather that other sectors are growing rapidly.
  • This trend is consistent with the global development theory.

Economic Trajectories: Agriculture’s Declining Share

  • Ethiopia shows high reliance on agriculture among other two countries throughout the overall period.
  • The volatility in Ethiopia’s agricultural GDP percentage shows a less diversified economy.
  • India started with agriculture contribution around 28-30% of its GDP in the early 1990s. There is a clear downward trend which indicates the structural transformation of the Indian economy.
  • By the mid-2000s it dropped below 20%, and by the end of the period it’s around 15-16%.
  • The United States consistently shows a very low percentage of agriculture in its GDP.
  • This indicates a highly diversified and advanced economy.

The Inverse Relationship: GDP per Capita vs. Agricultural Contribution

  • This plot shows the relationship between a country’s GDP per capita and the percentage of its GDP derived from agriculture for the year 2023.
  • The major observation from the scatter plot is a clear negative correlation between GDP per capita and the percentage of agriculture in GDP.
  • The observed negative correlation strongly supports the theory of structural transformation in economic development.
  • As income is rising from other sectors, consumer demand is shifting away from basic agricultural goods towards manufactured goods and services.
  • There are countries with similar GDP per capita that may have different percentages of agriculture in their GDP.

The Global Landscape of Agricultural Economic Activity (2023)

  • This image shows a choropleth world map of Agricultural percentage of GDP (2023).
  • Regions like Sub-Saharan Africa show a very high percentage of agriculture in their GDP. This suggests that these nations’ economies are mainly based on agriculture. This is characteristic of many low-income and developing countries.
  • Countries in parts of South Asia, Southeast Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe show green and light blue colours, which indicates that agriculture is still an important sector in these regions, but other sectors are also contributing to GDP.
  • Then, regions like North America (USA, Canada), Western Europe, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and other highly industrialized nations show very low percentages of agriculture in GDP.

Conclusion

In summary, this study has shown dynamic and fundamental role of agriculture in nation’s economic development. Through various analyses, study has highlighted several key points:

References