O Custo Privado da Reserva Legal para os Produtores Agropecuários de São Paulo e Mato Grosso nos Anos de 1995 e 2006 / The Private Cost of Legal Reserve for the Agricultural Producers of São Paulo and Mato Grosso in the Years 1995 and 2006

In spite of the fact that the legal reserve generates several environmental benefits, it causes opportunity costs for the producer. This paper uses the Zou, Ang and Poh (2006)'s model to estimate the opportunity cost of holding the legal reserve inside each farm in Sao Paulo and Mato Grosso States (Brazil) in 1995 and 2006 (which correspond to the last two agricultural census). The methodology takes the average producer by municipality and adjusts the number of municipalities according to Paiva (2007and 2008)'s method. Among the results, the following are highlighted: (1st) both technical efficiency and environmental technical efficiency are small in both analyzed states, but they have grown up between the two analyzed years; (2nd) the opportunity cost of legal reserve is lower in Sao Paulo compared to that in Mato Grosso (R$ 23,878 and R$ 48,353 per farm, respectively, in 2006), but the cost per hectare is 2.22 times higher in Sao Paulo in relation to Mato Grosso; (3rd) after displaying these costs on maps, some similarities and dissimilarities appeared among neighboring cities, which would be explored in the future by using spatial econometric techniques. New research might also be conducted about this paper's issue as new dataset becomes available.