Three essays on the effect of rural extension in the brazilian agricultural sector

• Ano de defesa: 2017
• Autor(a) principal: Freitas, Carlos Otávio de
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Viçosa
• Palavras-chave em Português: Extensão rural; Agropecuária; Eficiência técnica; Desigualdade de renda; Crescimento e Desenvolvimento Econômico
• Link de acesso: http://www.locus.ufv.br/handle/123456789/19844

The rural extension service is of great importance in the process of transferring technologies, information and new knowledge to rural producers. However, a significant part of Brazilian farms, especially small ones, has not obtained access to this service, which raises doubts about the effectiveness of the policy on the performance of producers and their ability to serve their target audience. In this sense, the present thesis sought to analyze the effect of rural extension in the Brazilian agricultural sector. To achieve this objective, three chapters were elaborated: Effects of rural extension on commodity supplies in Brazil; The effect of rural extension on farm technical efficiency in Brazil; Can rural extension reduce the income differential in rural Brazil?. In the first chapter, the effect of rural extension on product supply and input demand was analyzed by estimating a system of equations derived from a restricted quadratic profit function. The results pointed to a positive effect of rural extension on the supply of products, mainly related to private extension. In addition, the extension service contributed to a 4.1% increase in the average revenue generated by the products under consideration. In the second chapter, the effect of rural extension on the technical efficiency of Brazilian agricultural establishments was identified. For this, an approach that combines the stochastic production frontier structure, taking into account the selection bias in the adoption of extension services, was used. The results showed that the rural extension contributes, in fact, to the increase of the efficiency in the use of the productive factors, being this effect greater for the group of large producers. The third chapter analyzed the effect of rural extension on income levels and income inequality in rural Brazil, based on the unconditional quantile regression approach. Among the results, it was verified that, although rural extension contributes to raising the income of rural households, the service contributes to the aggravation of income inequality. It was also observed that educational levels and rural credit explain a significant part of the differences in incomes between adopters and non-adopters of rural extension.