Comportamento e determinantes das exportações de petróleo no Brasil

Abstract

Since the 2000s, it is possible to notice a significant increase in Brazilian exports of natural resource-based goods, especially crude oil exports, which became the second most exported product by the country in 2018. Allied to this, the discovery of oil in pre-salt reserves and the increase in international commodity prices, while providing comparative advantages for Brazil in the international trade of this product, raises concerns about the deepening of the specialization process in the exportation of primary products. This paper based is on two lines of research: the first examines the hypothesis raised of specialization in crude oil exports through the elaboration of sectoral specialization indicators in the period 2000-2018. The second line investigates the causes of the increased participation of oil in the export basket through an empirical estimation of the main determinants of oil exports. The results obtained indicate an ongoing specialization process in oil exports to Brazil in recent years. For the second line of investigation, the evidence derived from the estimation of ARDL models indicates that, in the Brazilian case, the sector benefits, above all, from short-term increases in international market prices, while in the long-term world income growth becomes the main factor inducing export performance.