THREE ESSAYS ON REGIONAL ECONOMICS
AUTOR(ES)
Carlos Eduardo Lobo e Silva
FONTE
IBICT - Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO
2007
RESUMO
The study on regional economics has two particular characteristics that differentiate it from any other field in economics. Macroeconomic variables and national borders are not the focus of analyses, even though regional planners can measure the regional effects of national policies. In this aspect, areas of study in which microeconomic instruments are the main tools, such as industrial organization, can be considered alike. However, what defines a region is neither the level of competition within it nor the specificities of the market; rather a region can be defined - and here is the second characteristic - as a delimited area where agents interact. Therefore, the importance of regional analyses seems to be correlated to the relevance of economic implications are in some ways dependent on geographic distance. This work explores some of those implications of considering distance in economic interactions. In the next two chapters, firms decide the distance between their establishments, whereas, in chapter 4, clustering firms decide their policies in terms of investment in human capital. More specifically, in chapter 2, the main purpose is to provide a link between the location decision and the internal organization of firms. In the model that focuses on the relationship among agents within the firms, the owner of the firm makes two decisions: who will have the formal authority (the owner or the controller) and where the manufacturing plant will be located (near or far from the owner). The results show that those two decisions are interdependent. More than that, for certain parameters, the corporation goes from the second best to the first best only if it changes the decision about both aspects; changing just either the delegation scheme or location may drive it to an inferior outcome. In these cases, a flexible managerial structure turns out to be a necessary condition for firms to benefit from locational advantages. The positive correlation between the decentralization of decision-making and geographic decentralization predicted by the model is supported by empirical research. Finally, at the end of the chapter, the recent headquarter location decision by the Boeing company is used to illustrate the results obtained. Extending the model of chapter 2, the next chapter proposes a framework to deal with many firms in the presence of agglomeration forces in order to address issues related to the fragmentation of production. The results of the simulation also show that lower communication costs lead the regional economy to what has been observed by the literature: the metropolitan area becomes more specialized in business services, whereas manufacturing production is spread out over medium cities. Moreover, the role of the managerial structures for fragmentation of production is also confirmed. Based on the results of previous chapters; which highlight the importance of autonomy of business units for firms to benefit from locational advantages, chapter 4 studies the investment in human capital in the development of clusters. The model aims to capture the tension between regional competition and scale economies presented in a region where many firms produce the same (or related) good(s). Opportunistic behavior can lead clustering firms to suboptimal investment in human capital and scale economies eventually (partially) neutralize those harmful effects of competition by attracting a third party that centralizes the bulk of investment. Through this process, the expected outcome of firms is described as a U-shape curve, where three stages can be identified: first, without competition, the only firm invests in human capital up to the point in which opportunistic behavior of new competitors makes all (or part) of them stop investment. This is the second stage, when the level of investment achieves its lowest point. Finally, if the cluster keeps growing -even with less training - at certain point training services become a profitable activity and a third party comes to the market, which can both partially neutralize the opportunistic behavior and offer training at lower costs than in any other stage. In Chapter 5, some final remarks can be found. They end the present work providing an overview about the main results, limitations, and possible extensions.
ASSUNTO(S)
custos de comunicação organização da firma fragmentação produtiva economia regional economics arranjo produtivo local regional planning
