This project provides a long-term perspective on agricultural productivity in Brazil. The primary task of the project is to establish the pace of productivity change by constructing indices of partial-factor productivity and multi-factor productivity (MFP) in agriculture at five-year intervals for two distinct regions of Brazil, from 1760 to 1888. The indices of MFP serve to answer three questions: 1) did Brazil's agricultural productivity performance truly conform to the "axiom of stagnation" that is expected of a backward economy, and attributed to Brazil? 2) were there large regional agricultural productivity disparities within Brazil? 3) did domestic-use agriculture suffer from differentially low levels of productivity, yet higher rates of technical change? These questions are answered by examining the trend in the MFP indices over time, by comparing the rates of change of the indices between regions, and by carefully considering the relative weight of domestic-use products in the regional indices to make inferences about comparative productivity in foodstuff cultivation and export activities. The project's second task is to test three preliminary hypotheses regarding the likely sources of productivity change within the respective regions. The three factors initially examined are the scale of production, as indicated by farm size and total farm value; distance from market and access to transport; and increasing mechanization in on-farm processing.
The results derived from these two tasks allow Brazilian agricultural productivity to be placed in a comparative context, illuminating key similarities and differences between Brazil and the better known cases of the U.S., U.K, and France, with respect to the pace of productivity change and its proximate determinants. They also inform the literature on farm productivity in underdeveloped twentieth-century economies, many of which confront conditions similar to those of nineteenth-century Brazil.
