A partial analysis of sharetenancy relationships in Northeast Brazil

In order to explicitly examine the implications of sharecroppers and landowners having different objective functions, and to handle a multiple-output complication, a mathematical programming structure is employed to analyze sharetenancy relationships. For a typical sharecropped plot in northeast Brazil, simulations are obtained when the landowner and sharecropper respectively are the decision-makers, and for policies involving abolition of share contracts, land reform, and variations in share of the cash crop accruing to the landowner. The observed shares permit agreement by the two agents on the farm plan, and this agreed-upon solution is Pareto-optimal. Beyond a narrow range around the observed share, the desired farm plans diverge, Pareto-optimality does not hold, and enforcement costs would be required.