Future of agriculture in southern Brazil : some policy projections through a dynamic regional model of the wheat region, Rio Grande Do Sul, 1970-1985

The authors do this by extending and projecting a recursive programming model of this region explicitly constructed for this purpose. This model has been used to simulate regional agricultural history in this region for the decade of the sixties and tested on the basis of available data for that period. The next section briefly reviews some of the regional characteristics and recent developments in the region under study; section three outlines the structure of the model including the policy assumption used for projection; section four reports selected simulation results for alternative policies for the period 1970-1985; section five draws on some of these results in order to evaluate alternative policy outcomes and the authors conclude with a brief discussion of the complex set of factors that need to be evaluated before future policy choices are implemented.