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Abstract
The Argentine Pampas agricultural production has experienced a remarkable process of
technological change during the last 25 years. This undoubtedly contribute to explain the
grain production growth verified in the same period. In this paper it is studied a specific
aspect of that process, which has as its correlate certain effect on the dynamics of the socioeconomic
structure on which the production is based. It is the relative change in the
agricultural production functions components: the weight of the intermediate consumption
goods increases thus decreasing the expense incurred in the payment of labor. This
alteration has a differential impact among different agrarian enterprises, since the
investment component on which large farms obtain their principal economies of scale is
enlarged while the one which does not constitute an accounting cost for the “farmer” units
is reduced. This paper builds and estimates (for the 1992-2010 period) an indicator that
measures the evolution of this aspect of the technological change process.