Comparative Analysis of Brazil's National and Regional Economic Structure, 1985, 1990, 1995

The changes that are taking place recently in the Brazilian economy raise some questions about its future. The goal of this paper is to analyze the differences in the productive structure in the Brazilian economy and five macro regions for the years of 1985, 1990, and 1995, using some established and recent contributions to linkage analysis applied to input-output tables. The main sources of data are interregional and intersectoral input-output matrices constructed by the authors for the years of 1985, 1990, and 1995 for the five Brazilian macro regions (North, Northeast, Central West, Southeast, and South). The next section will present an overview of the Brazilian economy in the 1980s and 1990s; in the third section, a brief discussion about the regional differences in Brazil will be made, while the methodology will be presented in the forth section. The results follow in the fifth section and some concluding comments complete the paper.