A Spatial Analysis of Residential Segregation By Race and Income Gap in a Brazilian Metropolitan Area

Inequalities between White and Black people are known in many countries around the world. It affects, for example, the income, educational and health outcomes having multiple causes, as discrimination, composition variations and forms of segregation. Therefore, this paper proposes to analyze the residential segregation pattern by race on Belo Horizonte's Metropolitan Area, the third bigger in Brazil, and its variation related with racial income gap. The choice for this Metropolis was made, once bigger Metropolises, as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, was already analyzed; but the techniques used here is not generally applied, due to being the first time that racial information are in universe questionnaire of census. Then, to this goal, data from 2010 Brazilian demographic census are analyzed through spatial analysis techniques, as "spatial lag" and "spatial error", adding a spatially lagged variable, differently of some "aspatial" indexes currently used - as Dissimilarity Index, for example. The main goal is to show that residential segregation by race exists on Brazilians Metropolises, unlike the greater part of the literature claim the opposite, pointing socio-occupational status as unique cause of segregation. The results shows a large concentration of White people in the center of Metropolis, while Black people are in the periphery. Indeed, there is some overlap between household income and racial distribution on urban space, but is not only this that explains the existing segregation. Therefore, the proposal is to discuss how residential segregation conforms this Metropolitan Area, and how it is related with income gap between White and Black. The conclusion shows that residential segregation by race exists in this context and has relations with racial inequality in Brazilian Metropolises.