Minimum comparable areas for the period 1872–2010: An aggregation of Brazilian municipalities

Abstract

Since the imperial era, the number of municipalities in Brazil has risen continually and substantially. These changes in the delineation of spatial units pose a difficulty for any research that intends to use regional data from different years. The present paper de­velops a routine for the generation of time-consistent ‘Minimum Comparable Areas’ (AMC) for any arbitrary sub-period between two census years in the range between the first and last demographic census 1872–2010. It relies on recently compiled material by the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IBGE). The corresponding Stata code is provided in the Appendix of the paper. Thus, the developed AMCs are immediately accessible and enable long-term panel studies with regional data.