The Brazilian Agrarian Reform Program has subsidized the settlement of over 425,000 destitute families on previously unproductive land in what has become a very effective vehicle for social inclusion and productivity growth for those settlers who reach the final stage of the process and receive definitive title to the land. Unfortunately, there is a large difference in efficiency and productivity between more and less successful settlements -fewer than 10% of relocated families have received title and over 25% of them have abandoned the property to which they were assigned. This paper presents a decision support methodology for increasing the efficiency of public investments in agrarian reform that includes a data envelopment analysis model and a mechanism for building consensus among the various constituencies of the agrarian reform process, who not infrequently have conflicting objectives. The OR model described herein uses principal component analysis and data envelopment analysis to identify the most important success factors for relocated families leading to an increase in the chance of both autonomous integration with the market economy and definitive entitlement by these displaced families as well as an increase in the predictability of future settlement success. The model was implemented successfully in Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state of Brazil, and was partially used in a pilot project for the countrywide agrarian reform accelerated consolidation program.Emancipac¸a˜o de Assentamentos Resultantes da Reforma Agra´ria -PAC) of the Brazilian Department of Agrarian Development. The methodology applies data envelopment analysis (DEA) techniques to measure settlement efficiency and to modify each settlement's modus operandi in an effort to shorten the length of time to achieve self-sufficiency.The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 briefly describes the Brazilian agricultural sector and provides the context within which agrarian reform has been used as a policy instrument for wealth and income distribution as well as sustainable economic development. Section 3 describes the Brazilian agrarian reform program in detail and suggests some reasons for the proliferation of inefficient settlements. Section 4 offers a brief literature review of the DEA methodology including its use in rural applications and a description of different techniques for identifying the appropriate input and output variables. Section 5 describes the above mentioned decision-support methodology. Section 6 describes the application of this methodology in southern Brazil, including a description of the region, the characteristics of the settlements, and the various input and output variables used. Section 6 also presents results of this Rio Grande do Sul case study. The last section offers concluding remarks and comments on the methodology's possible role as an agrarian reform decision-support tool for the Brazilian government. L. Melgarejo et al. / Intl. PORGpond -qualitative variable describing the level of organi...

 Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.  You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain  You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.

No abstract

No abstract

ResumoEste trabalho apresenta uma análise da evolução da eficiência de escala de operadores logísticos frigorificados que operaram no mercado brasileiro no período de 2007 a 2010. O estudo faz uso de Análise Envoltória de Dados e procedimentos estatísticos fundamentados na análise de componentes principais para seleção das variáveis input e output utilizadas na análise. Para a elaboração do estudo foram empregados dados secundários extraídos de uma publicação especializada da área de Logística. Os resultados mostram que o setor apresentou taxa de crescimento elevado e que as empresas acompanharam esta tendência. Retornos decrescentes de escala não foram observados na amostra considerada, o que sugere que o mercado apresentava potenciais de crescimento de escala ainda inexplorados pelos operadores logísticos frigorificados. O trabalho ainda apresenta análises da evolução dos escores de eficiências com eventos anuais relacionados à alteração do porte de três empresas emblemáticas que operaram no setor. Palavras-Chaves:Eficiência de Escala, Análise de Envelopamento de Dados; Operadores Logísticos Frigorificados. Abstract This paper presents an analysis of the evolution of temperature-controlled logistics operators scale efficiency that operated from 2007 to 2010 in the Brazilian market. The study uses data envelopment analysis and statistical techniques based on principal component analysis for the selection of input variables and output used in the analysis. To develop this study secondary data taken from a specialized publication of the Logistics area were used. The results show that the sector had high growth rate and that companies size followed this trend. Decreasing returns to scale were not observed in this sample which suggests that the market have had potential scale growth untapped by the logistics service firms that operated in cold supply chains in the years considered in this study. The work also presents an analysis of the evolution of scale efficiency scores with annual events related to change the size of three flagship companies.