Relação centro-periferia e o desenvolvimento desigual nos municípios mineiros com atividade mineradora

Abstract

The mineral extraction activities in the state of Minas Gerais, mainly of metallic ores in the meso Metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte, are responsible for almost half of the exporting national production and contribute to raise the country to a standout position towards the international market as a metallic ore supplier. Consequently, there are large sums of investments in the cities with mineral activities to make it viable operations that increase the local economy. However, this procedure of industrial production with exporting purposes and the ores commerce demonstrates some characteristics of the socio-economic relationships seen between countries with different levels of industrialization. This dynamic submits the mining districts to the unfortunate elements of this relationship, with detrimental effects to their socio-economic transformations. These elements are present in the bases of the Marxist Dependency Theory, the World System and the Uneven Development regarding the social formation of peripheral capitalism. In this scenario, it is valid to question if the mineral extraction activities, under the effects of structuring elements from the center periphery, reproduce an uneven development in the mining districts of Minas Gerais. This study intends to analyse the correlation between the mineral extraction and the structuring elements of the center-periphery and to verify the uneven development of the mining districts of Minas Gerais decurring from this context. The sustained argument of this study is: the mineral extraction, organically structured in a peripheral-capitalist environment, tends to provoke an uneven development in the cities of Minas Gerais in which the economy is representatively based on this segment. To do so, quantitative methods of Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis - ESDA and regression model of Difference-in Differences - DID were applied under a database of secondary sources of continuous socioeconomic variables from 2000 to 2010. As a result the study revealed some features of the structural elements of the relationship center-periphery above the average in comparison to the other districts from the state, in reference to a separation of the capital cycle between production and commodity circulation and the evidence of the effects of subordination and dependency from the mineral activities. It also revealed that the districts with intense mineral extraction activities demonstrated a significant statistical difference on the economic growth and a reduction on the desocupacion of labor force, without a corresponding reduction in inequality.