Environmental deterioration and development styles: the case of the northeast and the southeast regions of Brazil

Abstract

This paper work aims to contribute to the debate on the relations between environmental deterioration and development in Latin-American countries. It is argued that to the development style a country presents a pattern of environmental deterioration is corresponded. Two sources of environmental deterioration closely linked to the characteristics of the development style of most Latin-American countries were identified in ECLAC's literature: structural heterogeneity and the type of international insertion. Two regions were selected which present substantive differences in these two aspects: the Northeast (with a high degree of structural heterogeneity and international insertion highly dependent upon natural resources intensive goods) and the Southeast (with inverse characteristics) of Brazil. The indicators chosen were those proposed by the 7th Millennium Development Goal. In general, the results corroborate the expectations of this approach, signaling to the importance of the advancement of the understanding of environmental issues in the ambit of the development debate.