Italo João Bolqui Dutra

The cooperatives are societies of people who act in favor of mutual benefit among their members. A credit union is a financial institution in which its function is to provide financial services exclusively to its members, such as loans and financing. In order to contribute to the debate on cooperative credit, the objective of this work is to verify if cooperative credit positively influences the income of certain regions of Brazil. As a justification, there are several works that have verified the positive effect, direct or indirect, of credit and financial institutions on income, moreover, the growth of cooperative credit in Brazil is high and unequal among the Brazilian intermediary regions, with the South and Southeast regions being responsible for 77% of Brazilian cooperative credit, allocated within these states, as alternatives to bank credit. Thus, this work performs a bibliographic review on credit, its spatial distribution and the impacts on income, as well as a historical review on credit cooperatives in Brazil, the main works on the subject and a panorama on the growth, participation and spatial distribution of cooperative credit in Brazil between 2005 and 2017. As a result, based on spatial data panel models, cooperative credit presents an elasticity of about 0.06% on the per capita income of the intermediate regions of the South and Southeast during the period studied. As specific objectives, the analysis of the spatial distribution of the cooperative credit and the per capita GDP of the intermediate regions was carried out through the Exploratory Analysis of Spatial Data, verifying a positive and growing spatial autocorrelation of the credit, and concentrations in regions such as the interior of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, west of Santa Catarina and southwest of Paraná. Through the analysis of per capita GDP, there is a positive and growing autocorrelation, with concentrations in regions near the capitals of the states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. It was also verified the determinants of income of the intermediate regions, verifying that productivity, capital, government investments and human capital are positive to income, while productivity and capital present overflow effects between regions, the first being positive and the second negative. Finally, cooperative credit did not show overflow between the intermediate regions, but it is believed that in surveys with more recent periods or in smaller geographic cuts, such as municipalities, it is possible to verify the positive impact of cooperative credit from neighboring regions on local income.