Análise da dinâmica coevolutiva a partir da teoria de redes: estudo de caso da ferrovia brasileira entre 1998 e 2021

Abstract

The most important way of transporting exports of iron ore and agricultural products – the main products on the Brazilian export agenda – is the railroad. In the 1990s, just before the privatization of the Brazilian rail sector, trains were responsible for transporting approximately 20% of the total cargo in Brazil. After 27 years of private presence in the sector, there was no significant change in this percentage, showing that the sector did not advance in the share of cargo handling in the country, even having doubled the volume transported and having grown its investments exponentially in the 18 years following privatization. After this period, there are still problems of interconnection between the concessionaires, unavailability of routes and wagons, low flexibility of operations, low speed of the modal, little use of the rail network and high concentration of cargo in few types of products. Thus, faced with a sector whose environmental, economic and social attractions are comparatively greater than the road sector and a country whose geographical characteristics are appropriate for this type of transport, why was the evolution of the railway sector not able to gain space in the growth of cargo transport in Brazil? To analyze the interaction between the Brazilian railroad and the economic environment, the perspective of co-evolution and network theory was used to explain the mechanisms of impulse and damping of this dynamic between 1998 and 2021. Through the use of measures of dissimilarities of complex networks, the non-linear interactions between the railroad and the Brazilian economic environment over the last 23 years of private presence in this sector were evidenced. The dissimilarity measure makes it possible to highlight the co-evolutionary dynamics between these different levels of the Brazilian railway and economic sector. And, more specifically, the research contributes to the quantitative analysis between the relations of the sector and the economic environment, uniting the perspective of co-evolution and the network theory.