Distribuição espacial da indústria: possibilidades atuais para a sua investigação

The Brazilian economy underwent several strong structural changes in the nineties - trade liberalization, production reestructuring and change in the role of the State in the country’s economic development process - all of them potentially affecting the locational decision choice made by economic agents. That decade was a period in which the scarcity of economic Census data, plus the evidency of growth in productivity in industry, made an unwarrented action the use of both the spatial change in value added and proxies such as industrial employment to measure variation in this sector output. This articles discusses the possibilities and the limits of measuring the trends in the spatial distribution of the industrial Product in Brazil in the nineties. An evaluation is made in study of the alternative of using the variable “number of persons employed” as a proxy for the changes in the spatial changes that have ocurred in the industrial production at state level using data taken from sources such as the Relatórios Anuais de Informações Sociais - RAIS (by the Ministry of Labor) and the Fundação de Economia e Estatística - FEE