The use of productivity measures based on the assumption of perfect competition to evaluate public policies can lead to incorrect conclusions about them. In this sense, the present research aims to analyze how far from perfect competition the Brazilian industry is. The results indicated that the prices are, in general, 2.41 times marginal cost, which shows that the perfect competition hypothesis is not valid for the Brazilian industry and indicate that not considering the competition pattern lead to incorrect conclusions. The forest and metallurgy sectors had the highest mark ups (3.81 and 2.95 respectively), and these results are robust to assumptions about scale economies and different measures of mark up.
mark up; production function; industrial sector
