Geraldo Sant'Ana de Camargo Barros

Supply and demand shocks and the growth of the Brazilian agriculture

In the last decades the Brazilian agriculture had a strong growth. Our hypothesis is that most of that growth may be attributed to two general factors, which may conveniently be related to two types of shocks acting upon agriculture: demand-related and technological supply-related shocks. Demand shocks are originated both from domestic economy but also from external markets. We use Blanchard & Quah (1989) type of methodology to test the relative importance of supply and demand shocks on Brazilian agricultural growth. Our results indicate that supply and demand shocks have permanent effects upon agricultural output and prices. We estimate that the agricultural output growth in Brazil is attributed in large proportion to yield increases. We argue that integration to international markets was essential to assure the profitability of continuous use of new technology that led to yield improvements. This is why exchange rate plays a key role in explaining the performance of the Brazilian agriculture. We anticipate that, if investments in science and technology are maintained and international integration expanded, Brazil will be able to substantially increase its supply of agricultural products both domestically and in foreign markets.

Produção e exportação de algodão: efeitos de choques de oferta e de demanda

This paper is intended to analyze the growth pattern of the Brazilian cotton production after 1960. During this period the cotton crop expanded to new regions based on a new production system. An economic model is developed to measure the contributions of supply and demand shocks to the growth in cotton production. Thirty percent of that growth was attributed to productivity gains and 15% is related to the evolution of prices. Twenty five percent of the exports growth is attributed to productivity as well. The results indicate that – once established an economic scenario – land area and production adjust to it according to an auto-regressive process over a decade or more.

Relações comerciais e de preços no mercado nacional de combustíveis

In January of 2002 the fuel sector entered definitively the free market. Fuel prices from refineries stopped being regulated and importation of derivatives of oil by private companies was allowed. Ethanol prices had been freed since the end of the 1990s. The aims of this study are: to characterize the functioning of the fuel market identifying the main factors that interfere on decision-taking of its agents; to estimate equations of demand for gasoline C, supply of anhydrous ethanol and gasoline and to figure the elasticities of transmission of prices. Results have shown inelasticity in relation to the income and to the price of the demand for gasoline and inelasticity-price for the supply of anhydrous ethanol and gasoline A. Considering the transmission elasticities, it was concluded that an increase in the demand for gasoline C tends to increase the price of anhydrous ethanol more than proportionally to the price of gasoline C; the price of the anhydrous ethanol will tend to vary more than proportionally to the price of gasoline C in case of shocks of supply of anhydrous ethanol and, in the case of variations in the supply of gasoline A, the prices of the anhydrous ethanol and of gasoline C tend to vary in opposing directions

Contratos de opção: análise do potencial de sustentação de preços para o mercado de arroz

An economic model was developed to analyze the put option contract role to stabilize prices in the paddy market. The possibility of using Federal Government Acquisitions (AGF) to complement the option instrument was considered. The role of the options was to reduce the risks of storing the product for later sale. The model is applied to analyze the option instrument implementation in the 2004/05 season. A two week demand for rice was estimated for the Brazilian market. The results show that the market prices go up when the government acts through the AGF. The options serve the purpose of making prices follow a compatible path. It was estimated that the probability for the option owners exercise their options is greater when the AGF are not used. One can conclude that these two tools (AGF and put options) can be used in a complementary way, with the AGF raising the market prices in the harvesting period, and the put option contracts making sure that the prices follow a competitive path and reduce the risks of future prices.

A balança comercial do agronegócio brasileiro de 1989 a 2005

This study aims to analyze the agribusiness contribution to Brazil’s trade balance. A new classification of the agribusiness trade balance was proposed and used to analyze the aspects of the exported products –agricultural products, products of animal origin, industrialized foods and imported inputs – represented by fertilizers. Imports and exports vector autoregression models were used to explain the behavior of these variables. An increase of 1% in the attractiveness – product of the exchange rate by the international prices – boosts immediately the exports of non processed agricultural products by 1.71%, stabilizing at 2% after some trimesters. The attractiveness explains 60 to 74% of the forecast error variances of these exportats. It is noted that an exchange rate devaluation stimulates more the exports of products than it does the fertilizer imports. Besides, an increase of 1% of the GDP has an expressive impact (converging into -1.7%) on agricultural products exports.

A Influência do Preço dos Hortifrutícolas no IPCA: uma análise por meio da curva de Phillips

Supply shocks have frequently been related to the behavior of inflation. Those shocks are in general measured by changes in commodity prices (minerals, oil, agricultural commodities, etc.). The objective of this paper is to examine the influence of supply shocks caused by changes in prices of horticultural products (perishable with short cycles) exert in the Brazilian inflation. Although not quite studied academically, this process has popularly been associated with important variations on the IPCA index. To deal with this process, a Phillips curve, following New Keynesians principles, based on the semi structural model of small size by the Brazilian Central Bank and the estimation method used was Auto-regression with Vector Error Correction (VEC) in its structural version. The results show that there is evidence that the prices of horticultural products may have a considerable participation in the IPCA and inflation expectations variations and their shocks produce effects that persist for several months in the trajectory of these two variables.

Impactos Dinâmicos dos Fatores de Produção e da Produtividade sobre a Função de Produção Agrícola

This study analyzes the dynamic impacts of the production factors capital, labor and lands as well as total factor productivity (TFP) in agriculture economic growth for the period from 1972 to 2009. The results suggest that as the TFP increases labor decreases, and that the modernization of agriculture has brought technological innovations that uses less labor in the production process. The variance historical decomposition of forecast errors indicated that during the 1970´s and 1980´s, agricultural product was larger than expected. This was only possible due to the high productivity’s gains occurred at that time. During the 1990´s and 2000´s, while productivity continued to increase the potential output growth, factors such as low investment and decreasing land expansion limited the agricultural economic growth, which was lower than expected.

Ciclos econômicos na agricultura brasileira

This paper examines the role of productivity shocks in the context of real business cycles (RBC) for Brazilian agriculture. The productivity shocks were subdivided into two types, shocks due to supply variations and productivity shocks arising from technological advances or shocks total factor productivity (TFP). The proposed model is based on a RBC Small Open Economy Model. The model estimation was made using calibration techniques in addition with Bayesian econometric techniques. The results showed that a greater degree of indebtedness of the Brazilian agricultural sector would generate a higher capital stock, which could have improved the agricultural economic performance.

Uma análise da alocação de contratos futuros sobre commodities em portfólios diversificados

This paper analyzed the impact of including commodity futures (arabica coffee, soybean, corn, crystal sugar, ethanol and fed cattle), negotiated at Securities, Commodity and Futures Exchange (BM&FBovespa), in the performance of a diversified portfolio, composed by stocks, bonds, gold and dollar, between August of 1994 and December of 2007, when were studied the complete time break and subdivisions of two and three periods, adding a biannual analysis. Different strategies with these derivatives were considered: buy and hold or sell and hold contracts of first settlement or that took six months to maturity. Using he Portfolio Theory, results in biannual analysis and over the time periods 1994-1998 and 1999-2003 showed improvement in portfolio efficiency, but without statistical significance, according methodology used by Gibbons, Ross e Shanken (1989).

A regra ótima de armazenamento de arroz no Brasil

This paper aims to analyze the rice Storage in Brazil through a dynamic economic model of rational expectations in order to model the storage decision. The Storage quantities maximize the welfare in a competitive market with stochastic supply, in which all individuals are profit maximizers with rational expectations. The impacts depend mainly on the information available to the producer before storage is introduced, the elasticity of area supply, the specification of the demand curve, the storage costs and the rate of interest. These functions were used to estimate a dynamic model of rational expectations by a area supply function and expected price according to original storage, using a fourth degree polynomial in the stock. Then, a long-term simulation was estimated with the aim of show the impacts of high and low initial amount of storage in the market. The results showed that these impacts can be perceived for three or four seasons.