Juliana Franco Afonso

The importance of agriculture for economic growth tends to be unequal in the different Brazilian regions, due to the specificities of soil, climate and dispersion of the rural space, which interfere in the adaptation of crops and their technical and economic viability. However, technological innovations in the sector, as a result of investment in research and labor qualification, tend to reduce this inequality, since it generates productivity gains and allows the adaptation of crops between regions. This, together with investments in storage infrastructure that improves the flow of goods within the production chain and rural credit, which enables investments in modern inputs, tends to reduce the regional inequalities of the agricultural sector and their contribution to economic development. In this sense, this research sought to analyze the behavior of TFP in the Brazilian states for the period from 1990 to 2014, evaluating if its evolution tends to a convergence and the influence of investments in research, storage infrastructure, human capital and rural credit to accelerate this process . For this, an econometric model of fixed effects was used, controlling the spatial effects, that is, spatial dependence and spatial heterogeneity. The result of the research, besides confirming the hypothesis of absolute and conditional convergence of agricultural TFP, showed that the average rate of TFP growth was affected by variables such as Rural Credit, Human Capital and Storage Infrastructure and spatial externalities, generating an acceleration in the Convergence process. According to the Akaike (AIC) and Schwarz (SC) information criteria, the Spatial Durbin Model (SDM) and the Regressive Spatial Crusade model (SLX) are the most adequate to explain the process of absolute and conditional convergence of TFP. The first one presented a convergence rate of 0.52% per year and the second one of 0.66% per year, the time required to complete half of the transition process of agricultural TFP between the Brazilian states of 134 and 105 A process of slow convergence.