Expanding Economic Base Theory to informal and non-monetary income: Evidence from the State of Bahia, Brazil
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, we discuss an operational framework to quantify and analyze regional economic development through the application of economic base theory. This theory asserts that regional development hinges not only on capturing income from outside the region (the basic sector), but also on the region’s ability to retain this income and circulate it locally for community benefit (in the non-basic sector). Our study focuses on Bahia, the largest state in Brazil’s Northeast Region, with a particular emphasis on its regiões geográficas imediatas (commuting zones). The study’s original contribution is to apply the economic base model in a Global South context using income data rather than employment data as a proxy. The available Brazilian data allow us to include in our analysis income flows that are generally overlooked in mainstream economics and entirely omitted from applications of this theory in the Global North. The findings underscore the pivotal role of informality, non-monetary income, and transfers, prompting further examination of regional income and its diverse sources in economic development analysis. Based on our results, we argue for a broader understanding of territorial economies as complex systems of socially embedded practices. This perspective calls for regional studies to shift away from the prevailing productivist viewpoint and toward a more holistic approach that embraces the diversity and richness of territorial economies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".