The role of the food processing industries in the economic development of the Paraná state in Brazil, 1980 to 1995

The Paraná State, one of the fastest growing states in the Brazilian economy, has gone through a lot of structural changes in the last two decades. In this time period, the primary sector activities lost in importance to the secondary and the tertiary sectors. In this process of going from an agricultural to a more industrialized economy, we do believe that the Food Processing Industries had played a major role. To verify this hypothesis, in the 1980-1995 period, it was derived a set of regional inputoutput tables for the years of 1980, 1985, 1990 and 1995. Using these tables it was possible to: a) identify and evaluate the relative participation of the food processing sectors; b) evaluate the relative importance of the food processing sectors in terms of interindustry and economic relationships; and c) implement and evaluated the final demand impacts on output, income and employment generated through the food processing sectors.