Sônia Francisca Fonseca da Costa
University of São Paulo, Brasil
[email protected]
Evaluation of economic and social changes in the Vale do Paraíba region - Brazil
Name of co-author:
Renato de Castro Garcia
This paper is focused on the organization model of Local Production Systems (LPS) in Brazil,
using four micro-regions in the Vale do Paraíba Region (VPR) as territorial unit analysis; the units
are: São José dos Campos, Guaratinguetá, Barra do Piraí e Vale do Paraíba Fluminense. The
objective is to evaluate economic and social changes in the VPR, within the period of 1990 2003, due to the presence of the institutional apparatus, public intervention and private
procedures. The methodology uses indicators of regional dynamics based on the statistics data
about formal job of the Annual Relation of Social Information of the Ministry of the Work. In
the last decades the LPS topic not only promoted scientific debates but also influenced
decisions on Regional Development of public policy. The agglomerations of efficient and
competitive firms in a determined territory has been the subject of empiric researches. The
development that took place in the Silicon Valley was followed by many other countries, mainly by
the first world ones. In Brazil, there are several studies concerning this issue, amongst which:
Vale dos Sinos (Rio Grande do Sul state), Franca (São Paulo state), São João de Aruarú (Ceará
state), etc. The present debate enlights the regional process analysis, in which the new forms
and tools of promoting the economic development tend to focus on the cooperation between the
public and private sectors. Hence, the VPR choice for the study justifies itself as the modern
industrialization in this region (Rio de Janeiro - São Paulo line) is directly linked to the
extraordinary growth of the industrial Metropolitan Region of the São Paulo state that has
increased by the VPR. Historically, this Region has concentrated important industries that have a
strategic position in the high global technology chains, such as: EMBRAER, AVIBRÁS,
Volkswagen, Ford, General Motors, Peugeot-Citroen, Ericson Telecommunications, National
Siderurgical Company (CSN), Thyssen, Michelin, Pilkington, Fuji Film, Kodak, Guardian, Nestlé,
Johnson & Johnson, etc. It is worth mentioned that the region located within the richest and
most dynamic macro-region in Brazil, the Southern one, that can be seen in another perspective.
However, we can see that the economic opening process in Brazil (1990) and the productive
restruction promoted changes in these economies with the divulgation of investment intentions
and new orientation in public policy. Due to the evidence of the necessity of a more careful
investigation about the importance of LPS in regional development.