Growth dynamics and space in Brazil

2003

The authors bring together two strands of the empirical literature and analyze the geography of the regional economic performance of the states of the Brazilian Federation from 1939 to 1998. Using tools from spatial statistics, they examine the spatial dependence of regional per capita income in Brazil during the past six decades. They also examine the role of geography in explaining economic growth patterns using intradistribution dynamic tools based on Markov transition matrices and stochastic kernels in a discrete and a continuous framework. The analyses reveal the existence of two spatial clusters in Brazil, a low-income cluster in the northeast and a high-income cluster in the southea…