Moisés Pais dos Santos

Both Brazil and other Latin American countries are characterized by strong heterogeneity, both in the productive structure and in the social structure, political and cultural. These countries are known to be one of the most unequal in the world and are governed struggling to promote economic growth even in the structural and macroeconomic post-reform period marked by the intensification of economic liberalization process and price stabilization programs from the decade of nineteen ninety. Studies on the relationship of cause and effect on growth and inequality have been inconclusive, leaving ample scope for further research, especially on a wide range of econometric techniques options. Several theories since the time of the classical economists seek to explain the determinants of economic growth. More recent studies have included measures of inequality in growth regressions to understand the long-term relationship between these two variables. The Brazilian model of predominant economic growth is characterized by low growth rates, low level of dynamism and intense social inequality. Thus, the first essay studies the short and long-term relationships between income distribution and economic growth in Brazil. Income inequality in Brazil is an old and persistent problem despite its mitigation through the implementation of stabilization and income transfer programs. In Brazil, income inequality hampers economic growth because of the inertia of inequality and also economic growth is revealed as an important tool for reducing income inequality. The second essay studies the relationship between inequality and economic development within twenty-six Brazilian federal units during the period 1992-2010, from Kuznets theoretical basis of this relationship is not linear. The results suggest that while under data in static panel confirms the hypothesis Kuznets nonlinear relationship between inequality and development in data in dynamic panel, based on the theory of path dependence, it was established the importance of the persistence of inequality to explain the contemporary inequality. The third study analyzes the effects of income inequality on economic growth in Latin American countries as well as test the hypotheses of the theoretical models that address the indirect effects of inequality on economic growth rates. The models like the political economy, imperfect credit markets, social conflict and the fertility model are important to understand this indirect effects of inequality. The hypothesis of income convergence was rejected for Latin American countries. The GMM system estimator suggests a nonlinear relationship between income inequality and economic growth, so the direct effect can be negative or positive depending on the per capita GDP of the country. With regard to the indirect effects of inequality on growth, a negative and statistically significant effect of the development of the financial system and fertility it was found. Therefore, it was not possible to reject the assumptions of the models of imperfect credit markets and fertility. Although both trials treating the relationship between inequality and growth, the first of which focuses on the Brazilian economy and addresses only the direct effects of inequality relates the indirect effects with the Brazilian reality without addressing the econometric aspects. Bicausal find a relationship between inequality and growth, the second essay explores the breakdown of national data to study the relationship between inequality and growth in twenty-six federative units, addressing the effects of growth and some of its determinants of income inequality. The third essay investigates the importance of direct and indirect effects of income inequality for growth in seventeen countries in Latin America.