Redes de cidades e crescimento econômico no Brasil

Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to verify the effect of the relationship between the Brazilian municipalities on their economic growth considering that they connect in a network structure. The development of transportation and communication technologies has made the world more connected, enabling goods, services, people and information to circulate faster. Increasing the connection between agents then becomes an important feature for economic activity. This paper evaluates the importance of a municipality being connected with other well-positioned municipalities in the network, thus expanding its possibilities for growth. The theory of regional economics has indicated as a major factor in the growth of a city its location, which would be important in forming agglomeration effects that would lead a region to obtain economies of scale. However, theories began to emerge that tried to explain why some regions grow larger than others, and hypotheses arose about the effects of cooperation or competition between different areas. Another argument for the difference in growth in the regions refers to the option of territorial organization that would minimize costs, and it may be that in some areas the best choice is city networks and in others, the emergence of megacity would be optimal. Thus, the methodology of this study seeks to reconcile these two ideas considering the possibility of effects of the relationship between municipalities without defining a format for this type of connection municipalities. For this, two network networks were created for the Brazilian municipalities, for the years 2000 and 2010 considering the flow of migrants between these municipalities. The choice of migration as a measure of the relationship between localities was because migrants make location decisions based on information about the economic characteristics of the various regions by choosing the one that seems most appropriate to their well-being. From these networks, positioning metrics of municipalities that capture the position according to their ability to attract “good” immigrants and send emigrants to good regions are used in a convergence model. The results show that, the position of the municipality in the network negatively impacts the possibility of convergence of the municipalities. Being misplaced within the network makes the growth potential of this municipality smaller, widening the income gap between the richest and poorest municipalities. However