In Brazil, the regional development policy is directed by the regional development funds for the Northeast (FNE), the North (FNO), and the Central-West (FCO), which invested more than ?36 billion in lagging regions between 2004 and 2010. This policy seeks to facilitate the economic and social...

Although the choice of the spatial scale of analysis is a problematic issue in applied research (specifically, in the literature of regional economic growth), it is evident that regional scientists have been very slow at demonstrating the implications of aggregation problems on empirical...

This paper examines the convergence process among the Brazilian states using different concepts of convergence and giving special attention to the role of human capital as the conditioning factor to convergence. Different measures of human capital are used in the estimation of the convergence...

The goal of this paper is to carry out two outcome evaluations of the northeast regional fund (FNE) in Brazil. With this aim, the paper assembles two types of outcome evaluation often implemented separately in the evaluation literature. The results of the micro- and macro-evaluations show that...