Regional rural development index of municipalities from the State of Mato Grosso do Sul

Abstract The purpose of this paper consisted to determine the level of rural development for municipalities from the State of Mato Grosso do Sul and its categorization, selecting relevant variables to compose the set of regional determining characteristics. To achieve this goal, the constitution of the Regional Rural Development Index (RRDI) was proposed, obtained through the latent factors, generated by the factor analysis, using the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) as an extraction method. This index was obtained based on 29 indicators derived from secondary data of the 2006 Agriculture Census and the 2010 Population Census. Among the main results is the extraction of seven latent factors, explaining 85,47% of the total accumulated variance, which represented characteristics related to rural health-domestic and production infrastructure, agricultural productivity, environmental preservation and degradation, educational and demographic aspects, agricultural jobs, and the relevance of land titling. The composition of these variables allowed IDRR to contribute empirically in determining the levels of localities rural development and to reveal a relatively homogeneous regional rural development pattern for the municipalities analyzed.