O Desenvolvimento Sustentável e a Contribuição dos Recursos Naturais para o Crescimento Econômico (Sustainable Development and Connection of Natural Resources with Economic Growth : An Application to Brazil and the Northeast Region)

This paper shows some relationships among economy, environment and natural resources. The concept of sustainable development is discussed, as well as its evolution along the time and the two competing approaches on this question. The paper also evaluates the connection between natural capital and economic growth, as well as testing the validity of the “Dutch Disease” for the Brazilian Northeast. With this purpose, it esteems an econometric relationship between agricultural area, employed as proxy for natural capital, and the per capita income growth of the northeastern region, using the data of its municipalities, in the period of 1970 to 1996, employing one cubical relation with panel data. Contrarily to the foreseen “Dutch Disease,” was not evidenced an “explosion and breaking” pattern of the process of economic growth associated to the expansion of the utilized agricultural area and total agricultural area of the Brazilian Northeast. It finds evidences that, in some measured the expansion of the agricultural Northeasterner border, in the analyzed period, contributed to the growth of the per capita income of the analyzed geographical units