Regional importance of the agribusiness in the Brazilian economy

Following Furtuoso and Guilhoto (2003) the GDP of the Brazilian Agribusiness is estimated to be around 27% of the Brazilian GDP in 2000, and the latest numbers show that it could be reaching 30% of the Brazilian GDP in 2003. Despite its importance for the Brazilian economy as a whole, the size of the Brazilian territory and the regional differences draws attention for the fact that the importance of the agribusiness is not uniform over the Brazilian regions, and if the agribusiness is also divided into its four components, i.e., a) inputs to agriculture; b) agriculture; c) agriculture based industry; and d) final distribution, the differences are even bigger. In this paper it is made a study of the importance of the agribusiness for the 27 states of the Brazilian economy, taking into consideration its four components. The analysis is conduct for the year of 1999 using an interregional input-output system constructed for the Brazilian economy by Guilhoto et al. (2004).