The development of Minas Gerais' municipalities and its correlation with ore production in a context of peripheral economy.

Abstract

In Minas Gerais there is an extensive variety and voluminous production of metal ore. The advantages of exploitation and wealth generation of this activity have been questioned in view of the unfavorable effects that dependent development brings to these municipalities. This work aims to understand the context of the apparent dependent development of mining municipalities in Minas Gerais, involving the period of the decades of 2000 and 2010, period of the ore price boom in the international market. For this, it was made use of the deductive method anchored in the premises of the Marxist studies of dependent capitalism and conjunctural analysis. The results showed traces of subordination and dependence of the development of municipalities in relation to hegemonic mineral extractive activities, evidenced by the high participation of royalties in municipal revenue and the representative percentage of direct jobs in the mining segment in the total number of people employed in these municipalities. This dependence extends to the state of Minas Gerais, due to the representativeness of the extractive industry in the trade balance together with the processing industry, which guarantees its surplus balance with concomitant participation in the GDP. Finally, these effects observed under the influence of the center-periphery relationship, such as dependent capitalism, Dutch disease and income concentration, foster heterogeneous and unbalanced socioeconomic transformations for the society of mining municipalities.