Retornos da Educação e o Desequilíbrio Regional no Brasil

The problem of Brazilian regional disequilibrium has usually been treated in the national literature from investigations using income and/or GDP per capita as a variable of analysis. For communities with low levels of inequality, this procedure is a good representation of the social welfare. However, for economies with high levels of poverty and inequality, the use of income or GDP cannot be appropriate. Accordingly, this article discusses if the approximation of per capita income between the Northeast and SoutheastBrazil has also occurred in terms of social welfare. To this, two measures of social welfare are used: Sen (1977) and Kakwani e Son (2008). The results suggest as occurs with per capita income, there has also been assimilation of welfare, considering Sen’s proposal. However, when it is considered the movement of the poorest income, present in the second index, there is a distance between the two regions. The analyses are made for the period 1995 to 2007. Finally, it was identified that the productivity gains of workers belonging to poor families in the Southeast were the main responsible for this gap.