Una medición de productividad y cambio tecnológico en agroquímicos: el caso del arroz Colombiano después de la revolución verde

Abstract

Productivity analysis is one of the most important topics in agricultural economics. There are several papers on the topic at the international level, but for Colombian agriculture there is a lack of documents, mainly because there are no data sources for long run series. Private entities such as Fedearroz have compiled entire data sets relating national cost matrices, product prices, yields, cultivated areas, and other useful data to develop sector studies. For this case, rice sector productivity and technical changes are to be analyzed to derive conclusions about factor substitution, productivity changes, and technical change effects on production. This essay is divided into five sections, the first introduces reader to Colombian rice production characteristics: how, when, and who produces rice. Second section shows an extensive theoretical frame about technical change and productivity, showing how those topics slowly linked each other. Third section introduces and formalizes analysis of cost functions and their link with productivity. Fourth section shows results separately for rain-fed and irrigated-mechanized rice, linking technical change with productivity to generate policies to reduce use for agrochemicals. Last section concludes.