Alysson Luiz Stege

Because the rural Brazilian population has heterogeneous characteristics of social, technical and regional aspects, it is necessary to know how the rural development is distributed all over Brazil. From this point of view, the objective of this paper is to analyze the rural development in the Brazilian micro-regions, inserted in the multidimensional context of the rural development. By using the technique of multivaried statistics, more specifically, the factorial analysis, a synthetic index is produced, the Rural Development Index, which will be used for the 558 Brazilian micro-regions. It is also tried to check the spatial dependence of the calculated index. The results indicate a very heterogeneous rural development in the micro-regions, and that the rural development process is more than the analysis of the economic growth calculated by the product and income per capita, because factors were found in relation to the well-being of rural domiciles, environmental, educational and others. It was observed that the Rural Development Index is influenced by the spatial proximity, in other words, the Rural Development Index of one micro-region interferes with the neighbouring micro-region Rural Development Index.