Economic growth in Brazil: a spatial filtering approach

This paper examines the importance of space to per capita GDP growth in Brazil for the period 1980–2004 at the micro-regional level. The role of space is investigated by applying a spatial filter that eliminates the spatial dependence of the data and allows comparison with the original data. The conditioning variables become insignificant after removing spatial dependence. This suggests that the statistical significance of the growth determinants is intrinsically linked to geographical location and indicates the importance of space to regional growth in Brazil. Moreover, these results show that the convergence process is different across spatial regimes after removing this dependence.