Legislação portuária brasileira e seus possíveis efeitos sobre as economias locais

Abstract

The present work aims to evaluate the possible effects of changes in the legislation that governs the Brazilian port system on macroeconomic variables of municipalities that have port terminals. The Ports Law, nº 12,815 of 2013 aimed to modernize and expand the Brazilian port system, attract investment and increase competition in the sector. The core of the analysis of this legislation was the greater freedom of action for private-use terminals to compete with public ports, which previously held the sector's monopoly. Based on this new configuration of the sector, what was the behavior of GDP, wages, the number of people employed and exports in these municipalities? The methodology used for this investigation was the differencein-differences model with multiple time periods. The results found show that there were signs of change in the behavior of macroeconomic variables for the municipalities that had or later received port terminals. The legislation enacted possibly influenced the increase in GDP and wages in such municipalities. There was no detectable change in the value of exports. And on unemployment, it was not possible to investigate the behavior, due to violation of the premise of lack of parallelism in a previous trend. Alternatively, another way of delimiting a group of treaties was performed with only endpoints created after 2013, however, no significant behavior change values were found, possibly due to the very low number of observations.