1. Introduction
The objective of this article is to evaluate the pattern of localization of industrial enterprises in
Brazil. Two of the major characteristics of the Brazilian economic space are its heterogeneity and
fragmentation. The regional economies have generalized disparities in their subsystems of
transportation, urban infrastructure, per capita income, labor competency, and innovative capability.
For the research proposed herein, these are characteristics which affect the locational preferences of the
organizations and their competitiveness abroad.1
The article has four sections. Section 1 discusses some of the theoretical and empirical aspects
related to industrial localization and Brazil’s particularities, in view of its territorial dimension and the
fact that Brazil is a developing country that has gone through several constraints to grow. Section 2
seeks to identify the relevant industrial clusters by means of a typology based on the analysis of spatial
correlations. Section 3 describes the econometric modeling and presents the models estimated for the
industrial localization and industrial foreign trade. Section 4 comments on the implications of the study
for regional and industrial development policies.
2. Industrial Localization in Brazil
The heterogeneity of industrial localization in Brazil can be captured by various indicators. For
this paper, n industrial database per municipality was used, which allows several sectoral and regional
analysis. In one of these crosscuts, the industrial production base of each municipality was segmented
into four sectors: capital goods and durable consumer goods industry (BCD), non-durable consumer
goods (BCND), intermediate goods (BI), and the extraction industry (BE).2
Chart 1 shows municipality-based concentration curves resulting from this sectoral segmentation
determined by the respective industrial value-added (IVA). The curves show the cumulative percentage
of each sector, on a decreasing scale of individual contribution by municipality. The spatial
concentration of these sectors has a clear hierarchy: manufacture of non-durable consumer goods is the
least concentrated and the degree of concentration increases as one moves to the sectors of intermediate
goods, capital goods and durable consumer goods and the extraction industry. The concentration of the
extraction industry is basically explained by the heterogeneity and localized distribution of natural
1 There is a vast literature discussing regional disparities, industrial restructuring and localization. Recent writing on these
topics includes Azzoni & Ferreira (1999), Diniz (1994, 1996, 2000), Lemos et al (2003), Lemos et al (2005-a), and Pacheco
(1999).
2 In this text “firm” stands for “local production unit”. A company may have several productions units, but the existence of
local production units is what matters for this spatial analysis.