Name: OTAVIO LUIS BARBOSA
Publication date: 08/12/2025
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| ANA PAULA FREGNANI COLOMBI | Presidente |
| FERNANDO CÉZAR DE MACEDO MOTA | Examinador Externo |
| JOSÉ DARI KREIN | Examinador Externo |
| ROGERIO NAQUES FALEIROS | Examinador Interno |
Summary: This dissertation analyzes the relationship between economic dynamics and the occupational
structure of Espírito Santo between 2012 and 2024, discussing how Brazil’s subordinate
insertion into the world economy and, within it, the position of Espírito Santo shape labor
precarization. The analysis seeks to answer the following research question: what occupational
structure has the Espírito Santo economy, oriented by external dynamics, been able to produce
between 2012 and 2024? The study adopts a historical-structural approach that articulates the
transformations of contemporary capitalism, financialization and neoliberalism with Brazil’s
pattern of dependent development and the specific trajectory of Espírito Santo’s economy
throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Methodologically, it is an empirical study
of a quantitative and descriptive-analytical nature, based on the construction of social indicators
using microdata from the Continuous PNAD (National Household Sample Survey) and the
Annual Social Information Report, operationalized through the R and SQL programming
languages. The results show that the occupational structure of Espírito Santo is organized
around the centrality of informal work, which comes to dictate the dynamics of entry and reentry into the labor market over the period analyzed. In the formal segment, there is an advance
of the agenda of flexibilization of labor relations, with the growth of fixed-term, part-time and
intermittent contracts. In addition, the persistence of an earnings gap between formal and
informal workers and the narrowing of the advantages associated with higher levels of
schooling are highlighted. At the same time, Espírito Santo’s economy remains highly
dependent on activities geared towards the external market, reproducing a pro-cyclical
trajectory in relation to the movements of international capital and marked by strong
macroeconomic volatility, with direct impacts on the level and composition of employment. It
is concluded that the occupational structure produced by the Espírito Santo economy in the
period reinforced and deepened historical weaknesses of the labor market, especially
informality and low wages, indicating that precarization is not a conjunctural effect of specific
crises, but a constitutive dimension of Brazil’s dependent pattern of development that shapes
Espírito Santo’s insertion into contemporary capitalism.
