A Matter of Time: An Impact Evaluation of the Brazilian National Land Credit Program

SMC Author

Vilma Sielawa

Status

Faculty

School

School of Economics and Business Administration

Department

Economics

Document Type

Paper

Publication Date

10-18-2014

Description/Abstract

This paper provides an impact evaluation of the Programa Nacional de Crédito Fundiário, a Market Assisted Land Reform program in Brazil. Making use of a panel dataset and a pipeline control group, the paper evaluates the impact of the Rural Poverty Alleviation line of the program on the outcome variables of agricultural production and earned income, using both difference in differences and individual fixed effects models. Because beneficiaries acquired land at different times, the heterogeneous effect of additional years of land ownership is investigated. The findings suggest that the program is successful in increasing beneficiaries’ agricultural production by 100% and earned income by 35%, but only after four years of land ownership. Once the repayment of the loan is taken into consideration, however, the benefits of the program largely go to making debt payments and improving the net worth of the beneficiaries rather than to raising current household expenditures. If the program impact on income continues grow, as it did in the first five years, improvements in net wealth and current welfare could both be achieved.

Keywords

Market Assisted Land Reform, Programa Nacional de Crédito Fundiário, Rural Poverty, Brazil

Scholarly

yes

Disciplines

Business | Economics

Original Citation

Sarshar, V.H., & Helfand, S. (2014). A matter of time: An impact evaluation of the Brazilian National Land Credit Program. Working paper.

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