Algodón

Colombian's cotton producers could be displaced from the actual market if they do not adjust themselves in order to attend the new conditions of prices which are imposed by an opening economy. it is necessary for farmers that they adjust the actual production structure in order to recover, through the productive direction, the competitiviness which has been lost before and after the new policy started to be applied. This study was conducted to quantify the behavior patterns of such structure, estimating the reactions of costs and their basic components to modifications of prices inside the productive factors. This cost function and the corresponding elasticities were estimed, adjusting data corresponding to paid prices of such factors between 1973 and 1989. It was found that the production cost had a greater response to changes in price of capital (0.59), than labor (0.30) and land occupation (0.11). This response was explained by some rigidity in the productive structure to substitute mainly the requiered amounts in labor as well as capital. This fact, and the relative price increments in capital/labor and land/labor ratios, explain how the limited growth in productiviness, which is lower than that of cost, originated average increments per year of about two percent in the average cost. Two new hipothesis were stablished: a) the tendency to intensify the relative participation of labor and b) the presence of a substitution elasticity between capital and labor which is lower or close to one. Eventhough results show that for each one percent of reduction in the price of capital, as it is expected from the new political regulations, it could occur reductions of about 0.59% in cost, this result would only happen if the new policy is such that, contrary to the last two decades, capital and land prices proporcionalty decrease more than labor price. Therefore, the conclusion is that it is important to increase competitiviness in the market of factors, to rise producers interprise capacity and to dispose new technologies which could be real alternatives to the intensive use of modern inputs.

• Autores: GonzáIez H., Hermann A.
• Tipo de recurso: Article of investigation
• Fecha de publicación: 1992
• Institución: Agrosavia
• Repositorio: Agrosavia
• Idioma: spa
• OAI Identifier: oai:repository.agrosavia.co:20.500.12324/35359
• Acceso en línea: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12324/35359
• Palabra clave: Economía de la producción - E16; Algodón; Costos de producción; Política agrícola; Elasticidad de la demanda; Transitorios
• License: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International