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This paper examines Brazilian rural establishments that perform agricultural and non-agricultural activities. The combination of these activities, in the same agricultural unit, characterizes and defines pluriactivity. In this way, this research aims to verify the effect of pluriactivity on the efficiency of rural establishments, in technical terms. In order to reach the proposed goal, the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) was used to pair the sample in two groups, treated (pluriative) and untreated (non-pluriative). After the identification of these groups, a Probit model was estimated, followed by estimation of the production stochastic frontier to obtain the technical efficiency scores. The data used refer to a special tabulation based on the micro-data of the 2006 Census of Agriculture. Among the results found, establishments that carry out exclusively agricultural activities make better use of the available resources compared to the pluriactive ones, being technically more efficient. Acknowledgement

Brazilian South and Southeast regions produced more than 50% of the Brazilian agricultural production in 2006. The Brazilian government has implemented several policies to enhance farm income on these regions such as policies towards enhancement of cooperatives production management. This directly affects farmers in these regions given that around 24% of them were members of cooperatives. In this paper, we estimate the effect of this membership on farms profitability, output supplies and input demands. To calculate these effects, we estimate a quadratic normalized restricted profit function using the Brazilian Agricultural Census of 2006 for the South and Southeast regions of Brazil. Preliminary results suggest a positive effect of cooperative membership on profit of about US$ 4.1 million per year. A positive effect of membership on output supplies and on input demand was found. Acknowledgement : The authors acknowledge the suggestions of the reviewers. Some of them will still be implemented. Foundation for the Coordination and Improvement of Higher Level or Education Personnel (Capes - Brazil) Applied Economics Program, Dept. of Agricultural Economics Federal University of Vi osa-MG.

The objective of the present research was to identify the effect of rural extension on the productive performance of Brazilian agricultural establishments, using as a measure of performance the technical efficiency of farms. The data used refers to the microdata of the 2006 Agricultural Census, accessed directly from the IBGE secrecy room. For this, an approach that combines the stochastic production frontier structure, taking into account the selection bias in the adoption of the rural extension (Heckman's approach), with the entropy balancing method was used. The results show that the rural extension contributes, in fact, to increase the efficiency in the use of the productive factors, with the producers adopting, more technically efficient than the non-adopters. When considering the differences according to the size of the establishment, an even greater effect was observed for the group of large producers. In addition, in general, public rural extension generated higher technical efficiency scores than those obtained by establishments attended by the private service. Acknowledgement