1 THE WORLD MEAT MARKET AND THE BRAZILIAN ECONOMY: AN ECONOMETRIC INPUT- OUTPUT ANALYZIS Flávia Maria de Mello Bliska 1 Joaquim José Martins Guilhoto 2 ABSTRACT: This chapter analyzes how changes in domestic and foreign macroeconomic variables can affect Brazilian meat exports and consequently the Brazilian economy, and how changes in the production process in the animal-raising sector, and the slaughter and meat processing industries affect their share in the Brazilian economy as well as those of other economic sectors. The analysis is conducted in two stages: initially, a vector auto-regression (VAR) model is used to evaluate the impact of changes in the domestic and foreign macroeconomic variables on Brazilian meat exports. Thereafter, the results obtained in the VAR model are applied in an input-output model to evaluate the changes in the levels of importance of the different production sectors, and especially in the animal-raising sectors and slaughter and meat processing industries. The results indicate that changes in macroeconomic variables can cause significant impacts on Brazilian meat exports, that, in turn, can affect the Brazilian economy mainly in the 1 University of São Paulo and Institute of Food Technology (Meat Technology Centre) 2 University of São Paulo and University of Illinois (Regional Economics Applications Laboratory)