Total Factor Productivity and Misallocation in the Agricultural Sector: A Text Analysis

Agricultural productivity growth has been central to food security efforts, yet productivity-driven intensification raises sustainability concerns by exacerbating environmental pressures and resource inefficiencies. Addressing these issues requires integrated insights on Total Factor Productivity (TFP) and resource misallocation, which are conceptually related but largely studied separately. This paper offers the first comprehensive bibliometric and text-mining analysis of research on TFP and misallocation in agriculture, examining them both jointly and independently. Using 688 peer-reviewed publications from the Scopus database through 2024, we apply Structural Topic Modeling (STM) and keyword co-occurrence networks to map thematic areas, trends, and gaps in the literature. Results reveal a fragmented research landscape with limited integration between productivity and misallocation studies, and underexplored dimensions including institutional contexts, regional disparities, and farm heterogeneity. We argue that bridging these themes is crucial for policy design, and propose a forward-looking research agenda to stimulate integrative, sustainability-oriented scholarship.