Minimum comparable areas for the period 1872-2010: an aggregation of Brazilian municipalities

Abstract

Since the imperial era, the number of municipalities in Brazil has risen continually and substantially. These changes in the delineation of spatial units pose a difficulty for any research that intends to use regional data from different years. The present paper develops a routine for the generation of time-consistent 'Minimum Comparable Areas' (AMC) for any arbitrary sub-period between two census years in the range between the first and last demographic census 1872-2010. It relies on recently compiled material by the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IBGE). The corresponding Stata code is provided in the Appendix of the paper. Thus, the developed AMCs are immediately accessible and enable long-term panel studies with regional data.

Migration and Democratization in Brazil: The Case of Electoral Participation and Competition

“…Because of changes in mu nic i pal ity bound aries be tween 1991 and 2010, the num ber of mu nic i pal i ties in creased from 4,491 to 5,565 over that pe ri od. Based on the meth od ol ogy pro posed by the Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada (IPEA), we ag gre gate all mu nic i pal i ties into 4,267 min i mum com pa ra ble ar eas (MCAs), which rep re sent com mon bor ders through out the en tire pe riod of anal y sis (Ehrl 2017) and are hence forth our units of anal y sis.…”

Spatial skill concentration agglomeration economies

“…To calculate the growth of occupations between 1994 and 2010 correctly, we need to work with so‐called MCAs. Following the aggregation of municipalities proposed by Ehrl (2017) yields 4,298 MCAs for the period 1994–2010. Combining all data sources mentioned above and eliminating missing values, results in 4,093 distinct MCAs in the final sample.…”

An assessment about the relationship between educational inequality and economic growth in Brazilian Northeast region

“…From 1960 to 2010 the number of municipalities jumped from 2765 to 5565. So, to obtain time-consistent spatial units, we convert the municipalities into Minimum Comparable Areas (AMC) as proposed by Ehrl (2017). The compiled dataset is an unbalanced panel consisting of 695 municipalities over ten decades (from 1960 to 2010).…”