Análise do desequilíbrio regional de bem-estar no Brasil

Abstract

The problem of the Brazilian regional imbalance has usually been treated in the national literature from investigations that use income and / or GDP per capita as analysis variables. For societies with low levels of inequality, this procedure is a good representation of social welfare. However, for economies with high levels of poverty and inequality, the use of income or GDP may not be appropriate. In this sense, this article discusses whether the approximation of per capita income between the Northeast and Southeast Brazil has also been taking place in terms of social welfare. For this purpose, two measures of social welfare are used: Sen (1977) and Kakwani and Son (2008). The results show that, as with per capita income, there is also an approximation of well-being considering the Sen measure. However, when we take into account the income movement of the poorest, present in the second index, there is a gap between the two regions. The analyzes are done for the period 1995 to 2009. This is mainly because productivity gains in the labor market in the Southeast benefited proportionately more workers from poorer families. In addition, although the increase in schooling among the working poor was higher in the Northeast, the return of this education was lower, which contributed to lower productivity in the household. The research also contributes to the discussion on the determinants of wage income inequality using the decomposition present in Fields (2003) and based on Shorrocks (1982) to evaluate that the education variable proved to be the most important to explain both the levels of inequality in the regions and to determine the changes in the concentration of wage income in the period.