Inovação tecnológica e crescimento regional no Brasil

Abstract

Studying the determinants of economic growth is the key to understanding why there is so much income inequality between regions. The total factor productivity growth is essential for sustained growth and there is a close relationship between productivity and technological innovation. Therefore, it is important to investigate how the economies accumulate ideas and knowledge. This paper estimates the parameters of the ideas production function of the Brazilian regions, in order to test the importance of technological innovation in regional performance and investigate the existence of spillovers of ideas in the spatial dimension. Based on theoretical propositions Romer (1990) and Jones (1995), we estimate the ideas production function of Brazil and of its five regions by the method of least squares pooled and fixed effects, both with robust errors to overcome common heterogeneities in data panel. We provide evidence for two main findings. First, we find evidence of marginal decreasing returns in each of the factors of ideas production function, knowledge stock and human capital; and decreasing returns to scale in ideas production function. Second, there are no significant regional spillovers. Thus, the findings sound to validate the Jones (1995) parametric restrictions, implying that policies intending to stimulate knowledge production will be able to modify the level of productivity, but have no effect on the rate of long-term growth.