Plotting the metropolitan areas of Brazil in R

Here is a simple R script to download the shape files of Brazilian metropolitan areas by year and plot them in R.

obs. It's important to note that, since the 1988, metro areas are created by state governments. As a rule, this is done with absolutely no transparency nor any technical criteria. It is this legal issue, rather than the urbanization process in the country itself, that led to such an inflated increase in the number of metro areas in the country over the past two decades.

Number of metro areas in Brazil:

1970: 9

2001: 24 

2018: 77

geobr v1.1 is on CRAN

Good news! The new version of geobr v1.1 has been published on CRAN.

The geobr package in R is probably the easiest and fastest way to download shapefiles and official spatial data sets of Brazil. The package includes a wide range of geospatial data available at various geographic scales and for various years with harmonized attributes, projection and topology.

You can find a simple tutorial on how to use the package here.

The new release of geobr v1.1 includes 19 data sets:

1. country
2. region
3. state
4. meso region
5. micro region
6. intermediate region
7. immediate region 
8. municipality
9. weighting area 
10. census tract 
11. statistical grid
12. urban areas
13. health facilities
14. indigenous land
15. conservation units 
16. biomes
17. legal Amazon 
18. semiarid
19.  disaster risk areas

Awarded research on historical inequality in Brazil

I am very proud to share that my friend and colleague at Ipea Pedro Souza has been awarded the Prêmio Jabuti for his book 'A History of Inequality: the concentration of top incomes in Brazil between 1926-2013'. The Prêmio Jabuti (the "Tortoise Prize") is the most prestigious literary award in the country. The book is based on his PhD thesis, which has already received two national awards btw.

If you read Portuguese, you can buy Pedro's book here, or download his PhD thesis here. There is a paper in English summarizing some of the key findings of his research. I've also posted the English abstract of his thesis below.

Souza, Pedro H. G. F. de. “A desigualdade vista do topo : a concentração de renda entre os ricos no Brasil, 1926-2013”, 12 de setembro de 2016. https://repositorio.unb.br/handle/10482/22005.

Abstract:

This dissertation uses income tax tabulations to estimate top income shares over the long-run for Brazil. Between 1926 and 2013, the concentration of income at the top of the distribution combined stability and change, diverging from the European and American patterns in the 20th century. Contrary to benign industrialization and modernization theories, there was no overarching, long-term trend. Most of the time the income share of the top 1% of the adult population fluctuated within a 20%--25% range, even in recent years. Still, top income shares had temporary yet significant ups and downs which largely coincided with the country's most important political cycles. The top 1% income share increased during the Estado Novo and World War II, then declined in the early post-war years and even more so in the second half of the 1950s. The 1964 coup d'état reversed that trend and income inequality rose back to post-war levels after a few years of military rule. The 1970s were marked by instability, but top income shares surged again in the 1980s. The share of the 1% then decreased somewhat in the 1990s and perhaps the mid-2000s. There were no real changes since then. In addition, this dissertation analyzes the concentration of income among the rich, provides international comparisons of top income shares, and contrasts the income tax series with estimates from household surveys. The income tax series are also used to compute “corrected” Gini coefficients which take into account the underestimation of top incomes in household surveys. The major research questions are comparative and historically oriented, and I argue in favor of an institutional interpretation of the results. The motivation for and implications of this approach are presented in the more theoretical chapters that precede the empirical analysis. In these chapters, I engage with the history of ideas about inequality and social stratification and highlight the long and heterogeneous tradition of studies about the rich and the wealthy. My main argument is that the academic and political concern with distributional issues flourishes when inequality is conceived in binary or dichotomous terms.

The urban footprint of the largest urban areas of Brazil

All my procrastination energy led to me to create this nice little image comparing the footprint of the largest urban agglomeration in Brazil. I created this figure using R and geobr, a package that facilitates downloading official geospatial data of Brazil (a quick intro to geobr here). In our latest update, we included official data on the urban footprint of all Brazilian cities in 2005 and 2015.

[click on the image to enlarge]

Related post:

• The urban footprint of the largest metropolitan areas of Europe

geobr: data updates

Some of you are already familiar with geobr, an R package that we developed in Ipea to facilitate downloading official spatial data sets of Brazil (a quick intro to geobr here). The stable version 1.0 was published on CRAN a couple of months ago. Since then, we have added some new data sets.

geobr now brings official spatial data of natural biomes, indigenous lands of all ethnicities in Brazil according to stage of demarcation, and risk areas prone to landslides and floods in Brazil. These data sets are currently only available in the development version of the package, wich can be installed with devtools::install_github("ipeaGIT/geobr") .

The Access to Opportunities Project, live webinar with preliminary results

This week, on Sept 18 at 7pm (GMT), we will be broadcasting a live webinar to present some of the preliminary results of the Access to Opportunities Project. The webinar will be broadcast in Portuguese on this link and we will also be answering questions about the project.

Here is a quick summary about the project:

How many jobs can one access in less than an hour using public transport? How long does it take to get to your nearest healthcare facility or school? The answers to these questions are a direct result of the urban and transport policies implemented in our cities. These policies largely determine the ease with which people from different social groups and income levels can access employment opportunities, health and education services. These policies play a key role in building more just and inclusive cities and reducing inequalities in access to opportunities. Although the issue of transport accessibility has been widely studied in cities in the Global North, this topic has received much less attention in the global South and particularly in Brazil.

My team and I at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea) are launching the Access to Opportunities Project to map and analyze urban accessibility in Brazilian cities. The purpose of the project is to estimate accessibility to job opportunities, schools and health services by public transport, walking, cycling and driving at high spatial resolution for all of the largest urban areas in the country. This year, the project will include public transport accessibility estimates for 6 major cities (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Fortaleza, Porto Alegre and Curitiba), as well as walking and cycling accessibility estimates for the 20 largest cities in Brazil. We are planning to expand the project soon to include other urban areas.

The Access to Opportunities Project is carried out in collaboration with the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP - Brazil), and it will bring annual updates on the accessibility landscape of Brazilian cities. One of the expected results of the project is to generate a wealth of data that will be made publicly available to policy makers and researchers, with whom we will be able to collaborate to analzye particular case studies and conduct international comparative research.

How Democracies Die

Here is a great seminar by Steven Levitsky talking about his recent book on how democracies die. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of his message in times of strong political polarization like these.

ps. I know. Politics is not really the focus of this blog. However, the coming Brazilian elections (this weekend) are quite depressing and I've found this video very helpful to make sense of the mess we're in. Spoiler alert: the video will not cheer you up.

Thanks Daniel Cardinali for recommending me the video.

Cities in Brazil: A Law and Economics Research Agenda

Just a few days ago, Edward Glaeser presented at the Harvard Law School Brazilian Association Legal Symposium (video below). Glaeser talked about his recent research and some of the questions it raises towards a research agenda on various challenges faced by cities in Brazil but also in other countries from the developing world. This is a self-recommendation post, I haven't watched the full video yet. Hat tip Bruno Bodart.

ps. curious fact mentioned in the video. Glaeser's PhD thesis advisor at Chicago was the Brazilian economist José Scheinkman.

The long-term effect of slavery on inequality today

According to a new working paper, 1800s slavery explains approximately 20% of income inequality in Brazil today. While the direction of the impact is not surprising, I'm impressed by its magnitude. I wonder how much investment in cash transfer programs would be necessary to achieve an effect of similar magnitude. Thanks John B. Holbein‏ for pointing to this study on Twitter.

Fujiwara, T., Laudares, H., & Caicedo, F. V. (2017). Tordesillas, Slavery and the Origins of Brazilian Inequality.

From the abstract:

"...To deal with the endogeneity of slavery placing, we use a spatial Regression Discontinuity framework, exploiting the colonial boundaries between the Portuguese and Spanish empires in current day Brazil. We find that the number of slaves in 1872 is discontinuously higher in the Portuguese side of the border, consistent with this power’s comparative advantage in this trade. We then show how this differential slave rate has led to higher income inequality of 0.103 points (Gini coefficient), approximately 20% of average income inequality in Brazil. To further investigate the role of slavery on economic development, we use the division of the Portuguese colony into Donatary Captancies. We find that a 1% increase in slavery in 1872 leads to an increase in inequality of 0.112. Aside from the general effect on inequality, we find that more slave intensive areas have higher income and educational racial imbalances and worse public institutions today"

ps. This paper also reminds me of this post on how presidential elections are impacted by a 100 million year old coastline in the USA. Hint: geology determined the distribution of productive land, which influenced the spatial distribution of African slaves which in turn influenced the electoral distribution. I'm not saying I'm convinced by this argument but I have to recognize it uses a quite inventive identification strategy.

image credit: Fujiwara et al (2017)

A glance of the street art murals of Sao Paulo

The video was made by Kico Santos and his team at Cinema de Rua. The current city policy towards the city's graffiti has been a complete joke, by the way. Thanks Vinicius Netto (Twitter) for the pointer.

Verticor from Cinema de Rua on Vimeo.

Mapped history of population expansion in Brazil

Early this month we shared an animation created by Nathan Yau mapping the history of population expansion in the US.

Here is a relatively simpler but still a nice animation of population growth in Brazilian municipalities between 1872 and 2010. This gif is based on population census data and it was created by a data visualization team at Nexo, which is one of the best news websites in Brazil.

credit: Nexo

Here is a similar animation but distorting land mass according to population size, like in those maps that got popularised by Ben Benjamin.

credit: Nexo

How Brazil compares to other countries in terms of area, population and human development

These maps were made by Roberto Rocco with data from 2008.

Area

Population

Human Development Index (HDI)

Brazil Racial Dotmap

A few weeks ago, we made a blog post about the racial dot map of Rio de Janeiro, inspired by Bill Rankin's maps on segregation and the racial dot map of the US.

Fábio Vasconcellos has just pointed out on his twitter to the Racial Dotmap of Brazil, with 190 million dots distributed distributed within Brazilian census tracts. The map was created using a Python script in QGIS, which is available on GitHub.

Each dot represents a person. Blue dots represent white people, while green and red dots represent brown and black people.

[credit: Pata]

Here is the US racial dot map. The two maps are not 100% comparable since the racial categories used in both maps are not exactly the same, but they give a rough comparison of how white and black populations are spatially distributed in both countries.

[credit: Dustin Cable]

Brazil's Income Inequality Compared Globally

Brazil is internationally famous for a few things, one of them is having one of the highest levels of income inequality. The good news is that inequality is falling in the country and in Latin America more generally. Here is a nice article on income inequality in Brazil and the relatively small but still important role of conditional cash transfer programms  (ht Renato Saboya).

Here are some more info on the historical evolution of income inequality in Brazil: An interactive chart (by Max Roser), and this interesting chart showing the relation between GDP and Gini index during each presidential term since the 1980s, published Alberto Cairo in his recent book.

image credit: Alberto Cairo

Related Links:

• The trend of income segregation in the US, 1970-2009
• Spatial income inequality in Brazil, 1872–2000
• "The Rich, the Affluent and the Top Incomes: A Literature Review" 

Spatial income inequality in Brazil, 1872–2000

Reis, E. (2014). Spatial income inequality in Brazil, 1872–2000. Economia,15(2), 119-140. 

*Thanks Leo Monasterio for the tip.


Abstract:

The paper provides historical perspectives on spatial economic inequalities in Brazil making use of a database on Brazilian municipalities from 1872 to 2000. A suit of maps and graphs describe the geographic factors shaping the historical development of the Brazilian economy highlighting the role of transport costs and its consequences for the spatial dynamics of income per capita and labor productivity. The remaining of the paper estimates econometric models of growth convergence for municipal income per capita and labor productivity. From 1920 onwards analyses are refined, firstly, by disaggregating the models for urban and rural activities; secondly, by assuming spatial correlation among variables of the model; and, thirdly, by enlarging the model to take account of the long run determinants of spatial growth convergence. Empirical results endorse the historical preeminence of geographic factors – in particular accessibility and transport conditions – as opposed to institutional conditions. The conclusion summarizes the results and proposes research extensions.

Brazil as seen from the ISS

"Early morning of June 12 2014, one of the Expedition 40 crew members aboard the International Space Station (ISS) took this picture of Brazil ... Sao Paulo is the large cluster of night lights near the coast on the right side of the frame. Rio de Janeiro is the coastal city to the left of Sao Paulo. Belo Horizonte is the cluster of lights near frame center." 

An amazing picture by Reid Wiseman (via Demografía - CSIC).

[click on the image to enlarge it]

[Image Credit: Reid Wiseman ISS040-E-010458, NASA]

Related Links:

• Brasilia from above  and here 
• Sao Paulo from above and here

Urban Picture

Recife (Brazil)

[image credit: ? via Urban Geographies]

Soundtrack:

Housing Bubble in Brazil

Robert Shiller (Yale Prof. and 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics, “for their empirical analysis of asset prices”) talks about the recent home price boom in Brazil, aka 'Housing Bubble in Brazil' (via Sergio Jatobá).

Related Links:

• Call for chapter proposals: Trends and Issues in Housing in Asian cities
• Location, Location: The Hottest Real Estate Markets On Earth
• Where Housing Prices Are on the Rise in the US
• Brazil's High Flying Real Estate Prices Outpace All Countries

Assorted links

1. 100 things we didn't know last year (via Bernardo L Queiroz)
   
   
2. Quantifying the Advantage of Looking Forward
   
   
3. The Economis: interactive guide to the world's housing markets
   
   
4. Where UK immigrants were born: 1951-2011
   
   
5. Brazil has more ATMs than any other country
   
   
6. The Google Art Project
   
   
7. Astrology and birth rates in East Asia
   
   
8. National Geographic Photo Contest 2013
   
   
9. The 52 publications most cited by sociologists in 2013 (Based on citation analysis of 1,166 articles published in 39 sociological journals)
   
   
10. Spatial Patterns of Household Car Ownership in London

click on the image to enlarge it

[image credit: Meead Saberi ]

 

Transforming Cities

A special issue on Transforming Cities by The Economist Magazine (via urban planning blog).

Transforming Cities: Special edition of The Economist magazine from The Economist Group