Estimando o efeito da desigualdade no crescimento econômico sob incerteza no modelo econométrico: uma análise para os municípios brasileiros

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between economic growth and income inequality. For this we used data of 1486 Brazilian municipalities in 2000, obtained the Atlas of Human Development the PNUD, the Central Bank and the Census 2000 provided by IBGE. We used the growth rate of GDP per capita over the period 2000 to 2009, as a proxy for economic growth, as a measure of inequality used the Gini coefficient of per capita household income. To avoid an improper model specification, which would cause damage to the analysis results, we used a method called Model Averaging. Given a set of explanatory variables and the dependent variable, Model Averaging is to estimate by OLS all possible specifications of models with this set of variables and then calculate a model that is a weighted average of all other estimates. We used the approach followed by FMA and Hansen and Racine (2009) on the choice of weighting factors, which is based on minimizing the cross-validation criterion. Due to the inability to estimate all models with the set of 17 control variables, the analysis was done in three types of scenarios. Based on Buckland et al (1997) and Schomaker, Wan and Heumann (2010), for calculating the standard errors, in all situations the coefficients β of interest were statistically insignificant. The results suggested, therefore, that we could not find evidence that income inequality exerted influence on the growth rate of the Brazilian economy in the period 2000 to 2009.