Análises Quase-experimentais Sobre o Impacto das Cooperativas de Crédito Rural Solidário no PIB Municipal da Agropecuária

In rural areas, many municipalities still do not have bank branches and credit cooperatives emerge as alternative institutions in providing credit, with distinct characteristics of banks, given their importance for local development. This study seeks to measure the impact of the implementation of supportive rural credit cooperatives in Brazilian municipalities on per capita GDP of agriculture (value added) using two quasi-experimental methods to provide robustness to the findings on the impact. It was verified a positive causal relationship, using differencesin-differences with matching by propensity score, indicating an average impact of the presence of supportive rural credit cooperatives on per capita agricultural GDP in 2010 of R$ 987,66, significant at 5%. Positive coefficients for the treatment variable were also observed in OLS regressions weighted by propensity scores, with the per capita GDP of agriculture roughly 20% higher for municipalities that created supportive rural credit cooperatives between 2008 and 2009. These results show the importance of creating supportive rural credit cooperatives in rural areas of Brazilian municipalities, especially in those that do not have them yet, since the role of these cooperatives is being played in order to contribute to the local growth.