TRADE LIBERALIZATION AND REGIONAL INEQUALITY: DO TRANSPORTATION COSTS IMPOSE A SPATIAL POVERTY TRAP?

In this paper, we focus on the regional (intra-national) impacts of barriers to trade, in the form of tariffs, in a national economy. More specifically, we are concerned with the spatial impediments for the internal transmission of the potential benefits of trade liberalization, in the form of high transportation costs that the more remote regions face. A cost-competitiveness approach, base don relative changes in the sectoral and regional cost and demand structures, is adopted to isolate the likely spatial effects of further tariff reductions in Brazil. It tackles the three basis for the analytical framework proposed in the literature: comparative advantage is grasped through the use of differential regional production technologies; geographical advantage is verified through the explicit modeling of the transportation services and the costs of moving products based on origin-destination pairs, as well as increasing returns associated to agglomeration economies; and cumulative causation appears through the operation of internal and external multipliers and interregional spillover effects in comparative-static experiments, such as those proposed here.

A typology of propagation of technology and social preferences in the process of economic development: An input-output approach

In this paper we look at the interplay of technology and social preferences in different stages of economic development. We use a set of input-output tables for 32 different countries, published by OECD. The tables refer to the period 1996-2001 and were consolidated in 48 sectors so that structural comparisons were possible. Through the use of the fields of influence of structural change for partitioned input-output systems, we confirm that, for different levels of per capita GDP, technological progress is an important element to drive output growth. However, as an economy evolves, our dataset also confirm that the composition of final demand, which reveals social preferences in a static way, move away from agricultural and manufacturing to services activities. Such structural changes favor sectors with weaker output multipliers generating a force that helps driving income convergence among countries.Social Preferences; Economic Development; Input-Output

Spatial mismatch, wages and unemployment in metropolitan areas in Brazil

The spatial mismatch hypothesis states that a lack of connection to job opportunities may affect an individual's prospects in the labour market, especially for low-skilled workers. This phenomenon is especially observed in large urban areas, in which low-skilled minorities tend to live far away from jobs and face geographical barriers to finding and keeping jobs. This paper aims to investigate whether this negative relationship between spatial mismatch and labour market outcomes is valid in Brazil after controlling for individual characteristics. Our conclusions indicate that there is no clear relation between different measures of accessibility to jobs and the probability of being unemployed. However, for wages there is a clear correlation, which is stronger in larger metropolitan areas in the country. Given the exploratory nature of this work, our results still rely on strong identification hypotheses to avoid potential bias related to simultaneous location decisions of workers and firms within the city. Even if these conditions do not hold, the results are still meaningful as they provide a better understanding of the conditional distribution of wages and the unemployment rate in the biggest metropolitan areas of Brazil

Uma Análise de Insumo-Produto da Distribuição Interestadual da Renda no Brasil

Este trabalho procura aplicar o Modelo de Leontief-Miyazawa para a economia brasileira com o objetivo de analisar os fluxos de renda intra e inter estaduais que decorre em da produção para atender a demanda final de cada estado. Desta maneira, veremos como as relações de dependência entre as estruturas produtivas dos estados brasileiros influenciam a determinação da renda estadual. Por fim, faremos uma avaliação dos resultados à luz da teoria de desenvolvimento econômico de Rosenstein-Rodan e Nurkse e superação das desigualdades regionais.Insumo-Produto, Miyazawa, Distribuição de Renda, Desenvolvimento Econômico