Analysis of sectoral and regional systemic patterns of KIBS services in the main urban agglomerations in Brazil: an input-output application

Abstract

The relative importance of the service sectors has grown continuously in the face of the social, technological, and productive transformations of the first decades of the 21st century. These changes are linked to the emergence of the phenomenon known as servitization, which is the incorporation of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) into the manufacturing production process. To assess the pattern of location and chaining of KIBS service sectors in Brazil, we considered the population arrangements of the 11 largest urban agglomerations in the country and applied the hypothetical extraction methods and the calculations of locational quotients on the input output matrices made available by the team of the USP’s Center for Regional and Urban Economics - NEREUS, for 2015. The results reveal that such services are primarily concentrated in the central cities of the arrangements considered, relative to the other cities in the clusters. In addition, there is evidence of a local servitization effect more evident in the capital cities. The study contributes to the international literature and, above all, to the national literature by proposing an unprecedented exploration of the sectoral and regional systemic patterns of KIBS in a country of the global South, with high regional disparity.