Socioeconomic Determinants of Sustainable Technology Adoption and Its Influence on Brazilian Agricultural GVP

Brazil’s agricultural sector is characterized by persistent productive duality: a technologically advanced export-oriented segment coexists with a large stratum of smallholders generating low economic returns. Understanding the economic determinants of this gap requires moving beyond individual farm surveys toward systemic, nationally representative evidence. This study examines the socioeconomic drivers of sustainable technology adoption and their effect on the Gross Value of Production (GVP) in Brazilian agriculture, using data from the 2017 Agricultural Census aggregated to 558 micro-regions and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). Unlike prior survey-based studies, the census-based approach reduces sample selection bias relative to small-sample surveys and supports a macro-level, ecological analysis grounded in complete census coverage. The structural model explains 69.2% of the variance in technology adoption (R2adj = 0.692) and 47.4% of the variance in GVP (R2adj = 0.474). The results show that rural cooperatives are the dominant institutional mechanism driving both credit access (β = 0.733) and technical assistance (β = 0.746), with effect sizes far exceeding those of individual-level factors. Access to technical information (β = 0.215) and technology adoption itself (β = 0.179) also positively influence GVP. These findings indicate that overcoming productive duality requires a systemic policy approach centered on rural cooperativism, digital connectivity, and institutional capacity.