Comparative policy simulations : economic development in Brazil to 1985

The authors do this using a recursive programming model that has already been tested by simulating regional agricultural history for the sixties. The purpose of the current exercise is to project regional development into the 1980"s under alternative policy assumptions about price supports and credits. The main focus of these projections is to determine what might happen if current policies are revised by terminating wheat price supports programs and/or credit subsidies. They hope such conditional projection will enable us to draw some tentative conclusions about the direction which future policy might take. The next section briefly reviews some of the regional characteristics and recent policy developments in the region under study; section three outlines the structure of the model, section four, the policy assumptions used for projection; section five reports selected simulation results for alternative policies for the period 1970-1985; section six draws on some of these results in order to evaluate alternative policy outcomes. The authors conclude with a brief discussion of the complex set of factors that need to be evaluated before future policy choices are implemented.