Comércio exterior, guerra fiscal e dinâmica regional assimétrica no Brasil e no Espírito Santo

Abstract

Regional inequalities have been analyzed for decades, although they sometimes find little resonance in the country's economic debates. For more than 500 years, Brazil has assumed a "territorial physiognomy" marked by imbalances and asymmetries and, therefore, the regional debate has always been marked by the demands of peripheral regions for more equality. With the abandonment of the "developmentalist state", the fiscal wars were intensified and, at the same time, some regions were linked directly to the international market in a movement of "competitive insertion". This was the case of Espírito Santo, whose historical trajectory erected a little diversified and regionally concentrated economic structure. On the export side, the state has assumed the role of great commodity supply platform. On the import side, the state was consolidated as a commercial warehouse via the fiscal war. The objective of this thesis is to estimate the main economic impacts and the regional repercussions in Brazil and Espírito Santo of the "competitive insertion" based on commodities in the face of the recent reversal of the international price cycle and the fiscal war as a regional development policy. In methodological terms, the use of the TERM-ES model (The Enormous Regional Model - Espírito Santo) brings important contributions from the regionalization adopted in a bottom-up interregional structure. On "competitive insertion", the results show that for commodity-dependent regions the main effect would be the reduction of investment and long-term growth, with small and spurious effects on the problem of regional inequalities. The question posed would be the challenge of diversification. Regarding the fiscal war, the impacts on Espírito Santo would be significant in terms of employment, income, investment and production, including some positive results in other regions, breaking with the idea that the benefits would be restricted only to the states practicing the fiscal war. From the tax point of view this dispute can be considered predatory, but it would still guarantee welfare gains for the regional population (welfare-improving), helping to understand, in part, the vitality of these policies. "Competitive insertion" and the fiscal war stress the relations that integrate the country. There are still spaces to deepen the discussions and this thesis, above all, seeks to highlight the need to rescue structural determinations to think about the spatial dimension of the development process.