Tropics and income: Longitudinal evidence from Brazil

Abstract

This article investigates tropical disadvantage effect on economic development. We run regressions like Ram (1999, 2015) for Brazilian States. The methodology used is more adequate than Ram's papers because for two main reasons: (a) Cribari-Neto (2004) estimator is the most appropriate to small samples contaminated with outliers and, (b).our results are based on tests for the equality of the coefficients among the years. The advantage of a state associated of being located far from equator has not fallen in the analyzed period for our Brazilian sample. Contrary to the U.S. evidence, we found that the effect is stable across the time. Parker (2000) suggests one possible explanation to this result.