تاثیر شدت تکنولوژی صادرات بر رشد اقتصادی مناطق کوچک برزیلی: یک تجزیه و تحلیل فاصله ای با پنل اطلاعات The effect of technological intensity of exports on the economic growth of Brazilian microregions: A spatial analysis with panel data

1. Introduction There is a vast number of works in the literature, both theoretical and empirical, showing that exports are one of the economic growth conditions in a country or region (Balassa, 1978, 1985; Feder, 1982; Salvatore and Hatcher, 1991; Crespo-Cuaresma and Wörz, 2005). The positive effects of exports on the growth can be divided into two paths: the direct or the indirect effect. Direct effects occur because exports are one component of the Gross Internal Product of a country; therefore, an increase in exports is followed by increase in the product (Balassa, 1978). While the indirect effects are harder to be seen, since they derive from the positive effects on the economy of scale, use capability growth and productivity gains, among others (Feder, 1982; Crespo-Cuaresma and Wörz, 2005). An important issue to be considered, and which is debated in literature, refersto the fact that the exports effect on the economic growth might be distinct, depending on the composition of the exporting agenda. The hypothesistested in the empirical literature is that exporting more sophisticated products promotes higher product growth than exporting less sophisticated products. The explanation for that is that the production of these goods has higher potential to generate economies of scale, productivity gains and knowledge (Crespo-Cuaresma and Wörz, 2005). The view that the composition of the exports agenda creates distinct trajectoriesfor the economic growth is defended by Hausmann et al. (2007, p. 2). For these authors “. . ., countriesthatspecialize in the types of goodsthatrich countries export are likely to grow faster than countries that specialize in other goods”. In an attempt to confirm empirically this statement, the authors built an index of exports productivity and, later on, correlated it to the economic growth of countries. The authors found evidence that the economic growth is influenced by the composition of the exports agenda, and the high productivity (more sophisticated) exports are associated to higher economic growth rates. Developing the same line of thought, Crespo-Cuaresma and Wörz (2005) evaluated the indirect effects of exports on the economic growth, taking as a differential the disaggregation of exports considering the technological intensity of the exported products, classifying them into: non-manufactured products, low technology manufactured products and high technology manufactured products. The data used by the authors was collected from 45 countries in the period between 1981 and 1997. In the aggregated analysis, among other results, the authors verified that the productivity of the low technology sector was lower than that of the domestic sector, and the opposite occurred in the high technology sector. Regarding the externality effect, the results were not significant. Next, those authors re-evaluated the estimates considering two sampling groups, OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries and non OECD countries. The new results showed that the productivity differential previously observed remained only for the non OECD countries and, once more, the exports sector externality effects were not observed in the economy. Therefore, a general conclusion ofthisstudy wasthat indirect effects of exports on growth resulted from the productivity differential existing between the exports and the non exports sectors, rather than externality; moreover, the productivity differential was higher in countries that did not belong to the OECD.