A balança comercial do agronegócio brasileiro de 1989 a 2005

This study aims to analyze the agribusiness contribution to Brazil’s trade balance. A new classification of the agribusiness trade balance was proposed and used to analyze the aspects of the exported products –agricultural products, products of animal origin, industrialized foods and imported inputs – represented by fertilizers. Imports and exports vector autoregression models were used to explain the behavior of these variables. An increase of 1% in the attractiveness – product of the exchange rate by the international prices – boosts immediately the exports of non processed agricultural products by 1.71%, stabilizing at 2% after some trimesters. The attractiveness explains 60 to 74% of the forecast error variances of these exportats. It is noted that an exchange rate devaluation stimulates more the exports of products than it does the fertilizer imports. Besides, an increase of 1% of the GDP has an expressive impact (converging into -1.7%) on agricultural products exports