Journal of Agricultural Economics and Development Vol. 2(7), pp. 290-295, July 2013 Available online at http://academeresearchjournals.org/journal/jaed ISSN 2327-3151 ©2013 Academe Research Journals Full Length Research Paper The assessment of economic indicators using GM cotton worldwide over time Julian Witjaksono 1,2 , Xiaowen Wei 1 , Shuchun Mao 1 , Wankui Gong 1 , Haihong Shang 1 , Yabing Li 1 and Youlu Yuan 1* 1 Institute of Cotton Research, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, State Key Laboratory of Cotton Biology, Anyang. P.R. China. 2 The Assessment Institute for Agricultural Technology, Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia. Accepted 30 June, 2013 This paper reviews the evidence on the economic benefits using GM cotton with different patterns across space and time. To this end, we investigated the effects of GM cotton using global data from more than one decade of field trials and surveys. More specifically, the effects of GM cotton on crop yields, seed costs, pesticide costs, management and labor costs and finally net return were analyzed. Based on the literature searched, regression analysis was conducted to investigate and estimate the relationship between response variables and explanatory variables on these parameters. The results using regression analysis approach indicate that yield gain is the high expectation of cotton growers to optimize net returns. Put in another way, yield gain is the main factor influencing net return. As such, this study concludes that GM cotton is the technology which can lead to yield increases and capture higher net return. More so, lessons from this study may contribute to the assessment of this technology especially for poor-resource farmers in the developing countries. Key words: Regression analysis, net return, yield, benefits. INTRODUCTION The development of GM cotton cultivars provides cotton produce more options for managing pests, but their value to producer depends not only on the cost savings that they may contribute to the pest management system employed, but also on the gross revenues from the sale of the crop produced. Economic benefit is the most important factor that can affect GM cotton technologies among the farmers worldwide, not only in developed countries but also in developing countries. GM cotton not only provide an effective tool for controlling target insects (Wu et al., 2008), but also provide many social, environmental and economic benefits, such as reducing the use of chemical insecticides, benefiting the environment and human health, and increasing farm income (Wang, 2007; Brookes and Barfoot, 2008; Choudhary and Gaur, 2011; Huang et al., 2010; Tabashnik, 2010). There is a general belief that the GM technology will be a major factor in boosting productivity of agriculture, especially in developing countries. Several studies on GM cotton in developing countries claimed that its use brings benefits to smallholders because it decreased the number of pesticide sprayings and increased yields (Zhao et al., 2011). According to Kaphengst et al. (2010), there is substantial evidence that the adoption of Bt cotton provides economic benefits for farmers in a number of countries. For example, it is notable that in 2010, the biotech cotton area in India, which is the largest cotton growing country in the world, occupied 9.4 million hectares of approved GM cotton increasing by an impressive 12% gain between 2009 and 2010, despite almost optimal levels of adoption which reached 86% in 2010. The benefits of GM cotton hybrid in India are significant and the substantial increase in 2010 was due to the significant merits in production, economic, environmental, health, and social benefits (James, 2010). Over a decade after GM crops such transgenic cottons were first commercialized among smallholders in the developing world, there now exist a considerable body of evidence to show that their impacts have been mixed, *Corresponding author. E-mail: youluyuan@hotmail.com.