Beyond GDP: essay of welfare convergence in Brazilian States

• Ano de defesa: 2023
• Autor(a) principal: Moreira, Denis da Silva
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Biblioteca Digitais de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Palavras-chave em Português: Bem-estar; Consumo; Consumption; Convergence; Convergência; GDP; PIB; Welfare
• Link de acesso: https://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/96/96131/tde-19042023-163125/

The work of Jones and Klenow (2016) creates a measure for economic well-being using an alternative to GDP per capita, using consumption, leisure and life expectancy data in order to address the recognized weaknesses of the measure of GDP per capita. This work extended this methodology to verify the convergence of the well-being of Brazilian states between 2002 and 2017. The results indicate a real increase in well-being for almost all states, with life expectancy being the factor that most contributed to this growth. Furthermore, there was convergence both in GDP per capita and in well-being, however, the latter had a growth rate of 2.98%, twice as high as that of GDP per capita. We estimate, using the half-life measure, that it would take 29 years for states to reach half of the welfare convergence, while for GDP per capita, it would take 55 years.