Heterogeneidade estrutural e complexidade econômica na agropecuária brasileira

Abstract

The Brazilian agricultural sector is marked by a profound structural heterogeneity, understood as the coexistence of productive structures with very discrepant levels of productivity within the national territory. At the same time, in the rural development literature it is possible to identify the lack of instruments to empirically portray the structural differences between the regions. Therefore, the study presents an exploratory analysis that aims to evaluate if the empirical instruments of the economic complexity approach, proposed in Hausmann et al. (2014), can contribute to the understanding of the productive structure of the agricultural sector. To this end, three empirical exercises are carried out, based on the IBGE 2006 Agricultural Census. The first exercise uses the multiple correspondence analysis method with categorical variables to develop an agricultural technology intensity index, complemented by a local indicators of spatial autocorrelation analysis (LISA), in order to analyze the technological asymmetry of the sector among the Brazilian microregions. In the second exercise is carried out the construction and analysis of the product space network of Brazilian agricultural products seeking to identify how agricultural products are related to different socioeconomic indicators of the micro-regions that produce them, especially in the technological issue. Finally, the third exercise consists in the calculation of the agricultural economic complexity indexes of products and microregions, aiming to evaluate if these indexes can be used to represent the problem of structural heterogeneity in this sector, as well as to evaluate the spatial distribution of economic complexity. The main novelty the work presents is to make an empirical exercise of economic complexity focused on the regional dynamics of the Brazilian agricultural sector, something that has not been done before. The exercises bring important contributions by presenting a new way of visualizing the productive structure of the agricultural sector that allows a better understanding of the relationship between the agricultural goods produced in the microregions and the discrepancies in income, productivity, technology, land inequality and human development which are verified in Brazil. Finally, the paper concludes that the complexity approach is appropriate to represent the structural heterogeneity in the Brazilian agriculture, bringing advances to think the productive development of the Brazilian regions.