EVIDÊNCIAS EMPÍRICAS SOBRE CONVERGÊNCIA DA DESIGUALDADE DE RENDA ENTRE OS MUNICÍPIOS CEARENSES

The income inequality tends to decrease in municipalities with high inequality and increase in those with low inequality? This paper intends to answer this question by checking if there was convergence of income inequality in the municipalities of the State of Ceará, in the years 1991 and 2000. The main measurement of income inequality used was the Gini index, with the convergence tests conducted through models with threshold effect, in which the variables relating to the Gini index, to the per capita income and to the years of study were considered, measured in the initial period as possible threshold variables. The results allowed rejecting the hypothesis of convergence clubs of the per capita income inequality among the cities from Ceará. However there is no way to reject the hypothesis of conditional convergence of the income inequality in the municipalities among the same, where these would be converging to an average value of the bigger income inequality, that is, they would be turning themselves into more per capita incomeconcentrating municipalities