توسعه اقتصادی محلی: نظریه، شواهد، و پیامدهای سیاست در برزیل

Local economic development policies have surged in Brazil over the past decade—a major shift in this regionally diverse country of 27 states, over 5000 municipalities, and the largest economy in Latin America. We review the stylized facts, expected patterns and policy recommendations from the foundational studies in regional and urban economics. We then provide a summary of a more recent stream of scholarship focused on local economic development (LED) studies in developed and developing countries that have surged in the last 20 years. Based on this review, we then systemize the findings emerging from studies focused on analyzing local economic development policies in Brazil recognizing the distinctive contributions emerging from both the empirical and the case studies literatures. We identify key lessons for (and from) the Brazilian experience and conclude that Brazil and Latin American countries need a new generation of studies that undertake more rigorous evaluations of these policy experiments. Finally, we recommend steps to advance such research.

Local economic development strategies have surged in Brazil over the past decade—a major policy shift in this regionally diverse country of 27 states, over 5000 municipalities, and the largest economy in Latin America. Remarkable changes in economic conditions resulting from macroeconomic stabilization, particularly the drastic reduction in inflation, and government decentralization, have induced governments to direct increased attention to microeconomic reforms including policies to reduce unemployment and generate income in specific geographic regions within Brazil. Though research directed at examining how growth can be ignited at the local level has long occupied the attention of scholars, scholarship on how issues of public administration and policy are impacted in space in the case of Brazil remains an emerging field of research.

This study has focused on evaluating the insights gained from studies directed at regional and local economic development in Brazil. Based on this review, we have attempted to synthesize the contributions of these bodies of work for scholarship directed at explaining the divergent patterns of development across regions within Brazil. Despite notable advances, there are important questions originating from both regional science and LED literatures that require further study. In this concluding section, we briefly review these important gaps and identify questions where future study on the Brazilian case should be directed. As we have described in this paper, spatial concentration is clearly an important feature of Brazil’s economic development trajectory. Agglomeration in central regions has tended to persist over several decades. Evidence that positive externalities generated by agglomerations may be offset to some degree by negative externalities due to congestion effects for large metropolitan areas is also emerging. At the same time, the formation of new agglomerations as a result of frontier expansion in less-developed regions is a salient and increasingly important feature of economic growth across the territories, 27 states and over 5000 municipalities.