A atuação dos bancos como agentes financiadores do desenvolvimento econômico local e promotores da redução de desigualdades regionais

Abstract

The central proposal in this paper is to investigate the role of banks as possible reducing agents of regional inequality and promoters of local development, focusing on the dynamic relationships between economic growth, income inequality and financial inequality. Hence, this paper extends to the Brazilian reality the approach proposed in Lee et al., (2012), so that, for each Brazilian state, financial and economic ratios inequalities were calculated and organized into two panels balanced data, considering the period from 1999 to 2009. A third panel was prepared for each state of the federation, considering the growth of GDP per capita of cities in the sample data. Aiming to achieve the proposed objective, which is the investigation of the influence of one variable on another, were built a Autoregressive Vectors Panel model - PVAR as proposed methodology in Love and Zicchino (2006). The behavior of the variables was also analyzed using Impulse-Response Functions, and the main results indicate, in general, the higher the level of financial concentration in a region, the lower the local economic growth and an increase in financial concentration tends to increase the municipal income inequality.