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, industriali- zed 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 ex- change 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.