AS UNIDADES DE POPULAÇÃO HOMOGÊNEA (UPH) COMO INSTRUMENTO PARA DIAGNÓSTICO E DESENHO DE POLÍTICAS PÚBLICAS

The aim of this text is to present the advantages of adopting an alternative spatial aggregate for the municipal grid and for others currently available for diagnostic and social policy ends. Though it is usual to generate indicators on a municipal level, this level of spatial disaggregation presents important disadvantages for analytical purposes. One of them is the diversity in the size of municipal population, which in 2000, varied from 795 inhabitants in Borá (SP) to 10.3 million in São Paulo, the state capital. To deal with the matter of inequality in municipal population size and other significant differences from the point of view of generating statistically relevant indicators, this text presents a new spatial grid for national coverage, formed by what we shall call Homogenous Population Units - HPUs. These units were formed in response to various desirable planning requirements, which involve not only the similarity of population size, but also statistical robustness relative to the indicators obtained. This text presents the premises and procedures adopted to construct a grid of 1574 HPUs to cover the entire expanse of the nation's territory and presents some results derived from the Demographic Census, so as to illustrate the operational advantages of the new spatial grid.