Concentração e diversificação industrial no Nordeste pós abertura econômica brasileira

Abstract

This work aims, initial, check if there was a movement towards decentralize industrial activity in the Brazilian Northeast after the implementation of liberal reforms, expressed in forms of state deregulation, trade liberalization and financial opening; to verify if the metropolitan areas of Salvador, Recife and Fortaleza presented and maintained an outstanding performance against the other, if sought, too, presenting the factors behind the occurrence of this fact, in different periods selected. Therefore, we employed the methodological procedures separated into two stages: the first refers to the use of clustering technique, or cluster analysis, in order to classify northeastern mesoregions in groups, according to the similarities of the variables: Industrial employment, industrial wage and level of diversification of industrial employment, analyzed in three distinct periods (1996, 2003 and 2010) after the opening of the Brazilian economy. As a complement to the clustering technique, we opted for the use of analysis of variance by F test in order to verify the behavior of the averages of selected variables in order to check if they had similar behaviors in selected periods. In a second moment, we looked perform an essentially qualitative research to investigate the plausible justifications which explain the prominence achieved by the metropolitan regions of Salvador, Recife and Fortaleza, based on factors historical-structural, that explain why they responded better in terms of industrial activity, changes in political, economic and institutional contexts arising with liberal reforms, which were intensified during the 90s. It was concluded that inheritances arising from the processes of occupation and industrialization provided to the metropolitan the detention of competitive and comparative advantages against other, concentrating a large portion of the industries in the Northeast, and that before the new competitive environment, which allowed them to better benefit, supporting the prominent position of the metropolitan areas northeast, however was showing a decentralization trend toward the mesoregions of the Northeast, it was observed also that the distribution of indicators relating to infrastructural logistics conditions, potential of consumer market, distribution of the skilled manpower and apparatus of the service sector and banking network displays prerogatives to maintain the condition of inherited advantage, as well as the existence of higher levels of diversification of industrial employment in metropolitan areas inside the Northeast.