Desenvolvimento, meio ambiente e divisão internacional do trabalho: análise empírica para uma região de concentração de indústrias sujas e intensivas em recursos naturais no estado de Minas Gerais

The State of Minas Gerais - and more particularly our study-region - specialized, since the 1970s, in attracting natural resources intensive dirty industries. That type of regional industrial growth is linked to Brazil's - and Minas Gerais's in particular - insertion within the New International Division of Labor in which peripheral countries become attractive to industries with high environmental impacts, with obvious consequences upon local environmental and life quality.In this paper we characterize economic development in the Piracicaba River Basin's municipalities, their capacity to attract highly polluting and environmental degrading industries, and the environmental implications of that industrialization model. We proceed onto a double analytical approach that combines a political economic critique of the structural causes determining the region's development and the empirical statistical analysis of economic and environmental indicators. Using data from municipalities in the Piracicaba River Basin we sought to investigate the correlations between economic and environmental indicators as well as the structural reasons for those relations in the face of the specific insertion of the study-region into the international division of labor with consequent specialization in resource and energy intensive intermediary goods industries.