Database of Rural Technological Trajectories of the Legal Amazon delimited by the Method of Differentiation and Structural Signification of Rural Production

This database contains selected variables associated with the rural economic sector of the Brazilian Legal Amazon distributed at municipal level by technological trajectories (TT) – techno-productive trajectories and their technological variants (TTP) -, as defined and theoretically justified by Costa (2021, p. 217-219).

The TTs are designed by a method that combines differentiation and structural signification of rural production in a given territory – hereafter, Method of Differentiation and Structural Signification of Rural Production (M-DESTRU).

Structural differentiation (Phase 1) is necessary because production systems activities play different roles, depending on the systems  production modes and their territorial context: cattle ranching, for example, performs very different economic functions when practiced in family structures (peasants) in the municipalities of the Lower Amazonas, in comparison with wage-based farms in Southeast Pará; the roles played by temporary crops in the peasant systems of the Lower Tocantins are also quite different from those that are observed among employers' establishments in the Lower Amazon; and so on. This phase of the methodology qualifies these differences and has its procedures described on pages 441 and 442 of Costa (2021).

In phase 2, M-DESTRU verifies how these structurally dissimilar activities, combine with others linked to the practices of the agents of each production mode, conforming convergences that result in distinct patterns. These patterns are semantically associated with TTs or TTPs structures that are in movement, and these structures all together make up for the region's rural economic system. This Phase's procedures are detailed on pages 441 and 442 of the aforementioned work.

The territory of the Brazilian Legal Amazon encompasses 772 municipalities: all from eight states (Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Mato Grosso, Pará, Rondônia, Roraima and Tocantins) and part of the State of Maranhão (west of the 44ºW meridian).

The base data are from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), from the 1995, 2006 and 2017 Agricultural Censuses. The credit data for 2017 are from the Central Bank of Brazil.

The dataset is organized as: Zen1995_LegalAmazon_Inicial.csv; Zen2006_LegalAmazon_Inicial.csv and Zen2017_LegalAmazon_Inicial.csv. In each table the column names are self-explanatory.

Reference:

Costa FA. 2021. Structural diversity and change in rural Amazonia: A comparative assessment of the technological trajectories based on agricultural censuses (1995, 2006 and 2017). Nova Economia 31(2).