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Performance and determinants of the agricultural total factor productivity in the Brazilian semi-arid region in the period 2006–2017
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DOI：10.1007/s10668-026-08036-3.png)
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Abstract
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This paper examines agricultural productivity dynamics in Brazil’s semi-arid region, a territory characterized by climatic constraints, especially water availability, and structural heterogeneity. The study aims to estimate and decompose total factor productivity (TFP) between 2006 and 2017 to identify the relative roles of technological change, efficiency, scale, and environmental effects. The results reinforce the relevance of regional and sectoral policies to mitigate vulnerability to climate change by improving resilience, understood here as the capacity to sustain productivity through gains in technical efficiency (OTEI), adaptation to environmental conditions (OEI), and technological progress (OTI) in the Brazilian semi-arid region. A stochastic frontier approach was applied to microdata from the 2006 and 2017 Agricultural Censuses. Four model specifications: Battese and Coelli (BC92), True Fixed Effects (TFE), True Random Effects (TRE), and Mundlak-TRE (MTRE) were compared using likelihood-based criteria. The TFE model, which best controlled for unobserved heterogeneity, was used to compute a multiplicative TFP index decomposed into five components: technological progress, technical efficiency, scale efficiency, environmental effects, and statistical noise. Results show that agricultural productivity in the semi-arid region declined by 0.82% annually in the studied period, driven mainly by negative technical efficiency (–3.13%) and reduced scale efficiency. While technological progress and favorable environmental conditions partially offset these losses, they were insufficient to reverse the overall trend. This decline in efficiency appears to be rooted in structural and managerial bottlenecks, rather than in climatic constraints alone. Only 36% of municipalities exhibited positive productivity growth. These findings reveal persistent regional heterogeneity and the economic challenges of the semi-arid region are not solely due to natural water scarcity, but rather to the inefficiencies embedded in the region’s productive system. This is among the first studies to estimate TFP growth and its determinants, including environmental variables in Brazil’s semi-arid region using stochastic frontier models. The results emphasize that adaptive efficiency and local resource management have been more decisive for productivity performance and can guide more effective public policies directed to the to the rural development of the most vulnerable regions of the semi-arid in Brazil.
Keywords:
Agricultural productivity
Semi-arid
Total factor productivity
Stochastic frontier analysis
Technical efficiency
Brazil
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