Ensaios sobre as exportações do Brasil: análise do ambiente institucional e dos custos de comércio à luz do modelo gravitacional

Abstract

The objective of this study is to analyze in two essays the effects of tangible and intangible costs on disaggregated exports from Brazil - and its trading partners, because according to the literature - when these costs increase, the transaction costs of the economy rise and reduce the economic relations among trading partners. The first essay analyses the relationship between the institutional environment of Brazil and its trading partners on Brazilian exports disaggregated into high-tech, low-tech and non-industrial products, in the period from 2006 to 2018. When the countries' institutions are weak, the risks and uncertainties of the market increase, driving investors away and damaging the country's business environment. To analyze this relationship between institutions and exports, two indexes were constructed, through factor analysis, which represent the political and economic institutional quality of Brazil and its trading partners. These indexes were inserted in a gravitational panel estimated by PPML - fixed effects, to verify if the domestic institutional quality of Brazil and its commercial partners contribute or not to the increase of exports disaggregated by technological levels. Furthermore, by means of the indexes it was possible to calculate the institutional heterogeneity among the countries and later insert them in the gravitational models in order to verify if the institutional distance of Brazil with its partners affects the disaggregated Brazilian exports. The main results obtained were that Brazil's economic and political institutional quality proved weak during the period under review, in addition, there was a greater effect of domestic political institutional quality on total exports, high and low technology, while economic institutional quality would contribute more to increase exports of non-industrial products. In the second article, it was verified how trade costs affect exports of the agricultural and manufactured sector in the Brazilian regions from 2006 to 2015. For this, trade cost proxies were used, such as the bilateral, bilateral total between countries, such as the non-tariff price and cost, as well as the number of documents and time variables - to trade. For this, either the gravitational model of increased trade estimated by PPML was used. The results show different effects on trade costs on sectors and regions. It was also found that tariff prices had little effect on exports in most regions.