Ensaios sobre eficiência técnica e produtividade total dos fatores da agricultura dos países do Mercosul e da América do Sul

Abstract

This thesis consists of two articles that address the total factor productivity (TFP) and its decomposition through the Malmquist Index of technical efficiency variation of components and technological change. The first chapter analyzes the Total Factor Productivity (FTP) and the evolution of technical efficiency of agricultural products to the countries of South America in the period from 1991 to 2010 thus coinciding with the formation of MERCOSUR (Southern Common Market). There is also the formation of this economic bloc contributes to the member countries present greater overall productivity levels of the factors as a result of trade liberalization, rather than with countries that are not part of the agreement. For this, it estimated a stochastic production frontier and then calculated the Malmquist index, which captures the decomposition of total factor productivity into two components. The results showed that the formation of the free trade area was not enough for this group of countries obtain higher performance for countries not MERCOSUR members. It is noteworthy also that Brazil was the only country to achieve productivity gains, 7.13%. In the second chapter is performed a comparison of two different stochastic frontier production, the more narrowly Cobb-Douglas, which has constant returns to scale and elasticity of substitution equal to unity, and one in Translog, less restrictive regarding returns scale. The hypothesis is that by being more flexible, scores of TFP components are closer to the unit. The analysis is for a set of 12 countries in South America from 1991 to 2010. The results pointed to the literature as to the values of scores Translog model. Moreover, the estimation of the Cobb-Douglas frontier had more consistent and expected signs coefficients.