Regional Inequalities in Brazil during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

1. There seems to be no doubt that there are economic inequalities which are caused by the development process itself. Francois Perroux has said that ‘growth is disequilibrium’.¹ At the national level, disparity in development is evidenced by the presence of poles of growth that stand apart from back-ward regions and give rise to actual dualism within the economy,² as Jacques Lambert has shown in the case of Brazil.³ The cumulative mechanism of development — Gunnar Myrdal’s ‘circular causality’⁴ — merely sharpens such disparities. These disparities are not only inevitable: certain economists, such as Alberto Hirschman, regard them as a necessary feature of sound economic development strategy.⁵