Ensaios sobre determinantes da complexidade econômica em economias intensivas em recursos naturais

Abstract

The experience of natural resources-based economies with economic growth is notable for the constant need to overcome structural challenges, one of the main obstacles manifested by the inability to provide a beneficial change in their productive structure in favor of their activities diversification. Added to this are the challenges in seeking a level of productive sophistication compatible with a sustained trajectory of long-run growth. With this issue in perspective, this thesis aims to empirically investigate elements identified as determining/structuring within a context of the productive structure sophistication, via an instrumental and theoretical approach of Economic Complexity, highlighting the elements that favor or frustrate the complexity economy in natural resource-based economies. For this purpose, the thesis was organized into three essays, which associate specialization pattern, structural measures and spatial relationships with the process of improving economic complexity, performing analyzes with an international framework for a set of selected countries, national for the Brazilian states and subnational for the municipalities of São Paulo and Minas Gerais. In this way, they follow as an investigative line: 1) The effects of the conditioning channels of a productive and exporting structure based on natural resources on the economic complexity; 2) The concentration of natural resources exports as possible obstacles to productive sophistication; and 3) The spatial proximity interactions of productive sophistication. The first essay deals with the conditioning characteristics of the productive structure and the specialization pattern in a long-run context. Through the complementarity between the theoretical assumptions of Economic Complexity and the Curse of Natural Resources (MRN) literature, the essay associates the channels of instability (exchange rate volatility) and institutional structure (quality of institutions) to verify the long-run effects on the Indicators of Economic Complexity (ECI), taken as a proxy for the development of local capabilities that result in diversification and sophistication of the production and export structure. For that, it uses a cointegration analysis for panel data (PMG) structured on a sample of 54 countries, with different levels of economic development, as well as selected based on a criterion based on their export structure, in the period of 1995 to 2018. The econometric procedure covered the investigation of the effects of the volatility of the real effective exchange rate and institutional quality on the degree of economic complexity that a country can reach. The results indicate the influence that the two tested channels exert on the economic complexity of the countries, in particular, on those with a predominance of exports of primary products and manufactures based on natural resources. The second essay analyzes the determining/structural factors of productive sophistication in Brazil, with an approach to the dynamics of economic complexity in the states, highlighting, above all, the effects of concentration in natural resources on the country's productive and export sophistication. Because it is based on a long-run perspective, similarly to test 1, cointegration models for panel data (PMG) were applied with the 27 Federative Units of Brazil, in the period from 2002 to 2017, whose purpose is that the results the specialization factor (concentration of natural resources in the export basket) and the structural factors (infrastructure, human capital, diversity, income, trade opening) represent long-run relationships. The results show that specialization in primary products, manufacturing based on natural resources and low-tech industry proved to be unsuccessful in the sophistication process, so insistence on this pattern could deepen a low-complexity trap scenario. In sequence, third essay investigates the hypothesis of spatial improvement of the complexity of activities and products in the municipalities of São Paulo and Minas Gerais states, which were taken as an example of places with greater and lesser economic complexity, respectively. It is assumed that proximity to more complex regions triggers a positive overflow relationship, resulting from the acquisition and accumulation of non-tradeable capabilities (locally developed), especially in regions with greater productive diversity (metropolitan and with more intense economic dynamics). The methodology involves measuring the Economic Complexity Indicator (ECI) for all São Paulo and Minas Gerais municipalities; Moran's I and the Local Indicator of Spatial Association (LISA); and estimation of spatial regressions based on Global Scope Spatial Dependency Models (MEAG). The results confirm the existence of spatial dependence relations on activities complexity and reveal that the productive structure sophistication process has a spatially dependent component, indicating that neighborhood relations in São Paulo and Minas Gerais municipalities are relevant. Furthermore, the regional specialization pattern is a significant factor in the formation process of complexity clusters.