The Brazilian agribusiness labor market: measurement, characterization and analysis of income differentials

Although the Brazilian agribusiness sector’s relevance to the country has been widely recognized nowadays, to date, no study has been developed to evaluate the level of employment in this sector as a whole for Brazil. Therefore, the first objective of this study is to access the Brazilian agribusiness labor market, and to measure it, analyze its structure and characterize its workers. Agribusiness worker income differentials were also contrasted with income differentials in the aggregated non-agribusiness labor force. The main results from the study are as follows: a) in 2017, 18.2 million individuals, 20.1% of the country’s labor force, worked in the Brazilian agribusiness sector; b) agribusiness workers were predominately unskilled or semi-skilled with a low level of schooling; c) a large proportion of the sector’s labor force were not formally employed; and d) the average income of agribusiness employees was lower than that of individuals in other economic sectors. There is also extreme labor market heterogeneity among agribusiness sector segments – with the primary segment presenting a noticeably dissimilar profile – and a significant income differential associated with different labor market statuses, economic sub-sectors and locations, and with individual characteristics such as level of schooling, skin tone and gender.