As Unidades de População Homogênea (UPHs) como Instrumento para Diagnóstico e Desenho de Políticas Públicas

The aim of this review is to present the advantages of adopting an alternative network of clusters rather than the municipal and others spatial networks currently available for diagnosis and social policies. Though it is common practice to generate indicators on a municipal level and, based on these, define social priorities to guide activities on a national level, including those of the federal government, this level of spatial breakdown presents various significant disadvantages analytically speaking. One such drawback is the diversity in population size of municipalities, which in the 2000 Census, varied from 795 inhabitants in Bor´a (S˜ao Paulo) to 10.3 million in the capital city of São Paulo. To offset the matter of unequal size of municipalities and other relevant aspects in the generation of statistically significant indicators, this text presents a new spatial network with nationwide coverage, made up of what we will herein call “Homogenous Population Units” - HPUs. These units have been shaped so as to conform to various desirable requisites for planning, which involve not only similarity in population size, but also statistical robustness in relation to the indicators obtained. The text explains the premises and procedures that have been adopted so as to construct this network made up of 1574 HPUs covering the entire national territory and presents some results derived from the Demographic Census in order to illustrate the operational advantages of this new spatial network.