Geographical Indication and Centrality: A Hypothesis test in the Northeastern Region of Brazil

Geographical Indications (GIs) refer to products and services with unique characteristics of a given region, granting a certain level of excellence to these goods and services. Moreover, GIs are connected to the locations, in recognition of their territoriality, as well as to the region's cultural and historical identity, being attached to the level of centrality of the region and promoting greater trust, as centrality is directly linked to its catchment area. In this regard, the present work is aimed at carrying out a temporal comparison of the centrality indices of the five groups of Geographical Indications in Northeastern Brazil between the years of 2006 and 2017, in order to test the hypothesis established, determining whether such event is enough to explain the influence of the products and goods on their respective cities of origin. This is a quality-quantitative research, based on a bibliographic and documentary survey by analyzing five GI groups from the Northeastern region of Brazil, focused on their relative share of the Gross Domestic Product of private services in certain municipalities and taking into account five higher-order spatial cutouts: microregion, mesoregion, state, region and country. Besides determining the centrality indices, carried out using the well-known Principal Component Analysis (PCA), the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was also applied. The results of the present research did not identify any indications that granting GIs is enough to promote a distinct level of development to the municipalities. Therefore, GIs did not exhibit any relevant effect on the municipal levels of centrality