Are the Industrial Districts Still All Right ? Some Brazilian Contributions

Abstract

Industrial districts were elected as one of the priorities by Brazilian governments in the 2000s. Four of them received financial and technical support from both national and international institutions. This paper aims to investigate what happened to those four districts officially supported by the Inter- american Development Bank to serve as models to a large number of other districts all around the country. Italian districts were again seen as a path for development to some regions with productive tradition and history behind chain of production. A great amount of money was directed to those four districts as well as great efforts were made by the government and the private sector to improve the productivity and performance of the districts. Ten years after an evaluation made by this author in a doctoral dissertation, the objective is to assess the performance of some indicators for the counties or regions: GDP growth; sector employment; income and other indexes that can be calculated by using Brazilian researches. Due to the support received and to the fact that those districts were a part of the industrial policy of the country, some of the districts chosen perform as well as expected, but some of them, considering different measures, did not. In part, the reason was the lack of continuity of the support, that, for some of them, would be necessary for a larger period of time. On the other hand, the maturity differences between the chosen districts and a non- homogeneous selection might have influenced the results that did not show a shift towards local development.