Centralidade digital e redes urbanas: um estudo da hierarquia digital dos municípios brasileiros

Abstract

Digitalisation is a multidimensional process of great economic and social relevance. It is, nevertheless, markedly difficult to measure, and its relationship to other economic phenomena is poorly understood. This paper presents four interrelated contributions to this field: it proposes and applies a measure of digitalisation to all Brazilian municipalities; it develops a typology of the latter in terms of digital centrality; it explores the relation between digital and urban centrality; and it estimates the determinants of digital centrality. With data from several sources, a principal component analysis is run and two main dimensions of digitalisation are identified: a general one, with a positive contribution from all variables, and a secondary one that discriminates between the diffusion of digital access and the development of high-end infrastructure. A cluster analysis performed over the same data identifies five categories of municipalities: 2,225 digitally excluded ones, 2,477 with marginal digitalisation, 764 passive users of digital content, 95 autonomous content developers, with digital centrality – which can properly be called digital ecosystems – and 4 large digital hubs. The clusters are externally validated through big data, and then a multinomial logit model explores the relation between urban and digital centrality. The paper finds a strict connection urban attributes and digitalisation. It moreover shows how the latter’s initial stages are stimulated by educational improvements, but it is only by becoming integrated with high valued added economic activities that digital centrality is effectively reached. The implications for public policies are then explored, highlighting the need for active initiatives to spur the digital inclusion of the population, under risk of heightening regional, economic and social inequalities