Comércio e crescimento: uma estimação para o Brasil a partir dos estados brasileiros

Abstract

Since the 1990s many countries, including Brazil, adopted trade liberalization measures expecting to increase their economic growth. This trend influenced many authors to search for signs of the effects of liberal trade policies on economic growth. However, the papers in the literature that claimed to find a negative association between barriers to trade and economic growth relied either on constructing inappropriate indicators of openness or on a questionable use of econometric methodologies, especially the failure to account for the endogeneity of trade. Frankel e Romer (1999) overcame this problem by using an instrumental variable, based on a country’s geographic attributes not related to income, notably its distance from trading partners and size. They sought to measure the impact of trade volume not trade barriers on growth in many countries in 1985, since the reduction of trade barriers would affect positively international trade. Following this methodology, this dissertation estimates the effect of the increase in trade flows on income of Brazilian states, comparing the period in the late eighties and early nineties (1989-1991) with one more recent (2005-07), using geographic characteristics of Brazilian states, based on a gravity model. The main result shows a significant impact of trade on per capita income in Brazil in the more recent period, with a one percentage increase in trade shares increasing per capita income by 6% or 7%.