ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO EVALUATE EXPERTS’ PERCEPTIONS: AN APPLICATION TO AGRICULTURE IN BRAZIL

Resumo

Governments intervene in agriculture via public policies. It is the objective of this work to identify critical themes for public policies in market, production, and government regulation. Thus, based on a set of ten main groups of agricultural risks and the perceptions of experts relative to both the importance of these themes and the intensity of the corresponding government policies to relieve risk effects, we rank the themes using multicriteria methods. We particularly discuss Thurstone’s law of categorical judgments and the Saaty’s analytic hierarchy process. The two approaches lead to similar results. Infrastructure and logistics are regarded as the most important item for both methods from the perspective of theme importance, and they are the least important from the perspective of the intensity of public policies.