The Regional Question in Brazil: Nature, Causes and Policies

Alexandre Barros ()

No 50, Working Papers from Datamétrica Consultoria Econômica

Abstract: This paper presents an overview of the nature of the Brazilian Regional inequalities, focusing on some basic statistics and recent estimations that indicate that it arises mainly from differences on individual endowments (human capital) in the many regions, rather than on differences on the income captured by individual valuable attributes. It also reviews the major hypotheses to explain the inequalities and presents an alternative view, which argues that there is an equilibrium with inequalities that persists along time. Historical features of the colonial settlements in each region justified the original differences in their human capital. The paper then reviews the major regional policies applied in Brazil, hitherto, and evaluates them on the light of the hypothesis forwarded. The conclusion is that, as they did not tackle the major cause of inequalities, they end up generating limited results.

Keywords: regional development; Brazilian Regional inequalities; Regional inequalities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O54 R11 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2009, Revised 2009
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
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Published in Anais do VIII Encontro Nacional da Associação Brasileira de Estudos Regionais e Urbanos.

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ftp://repec.datametrica.com.br/RePEc/dtm/wpaper/Th ... tion_in_Brazil50.pdf Revised version, 2009 (application/pdf)
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Chapter: The Regional Question in Brazil: Nature, Causes and Policies (2011)
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