In 2008, according to the Demographics Study of the Brazilian scientific and technical base, the Amazon had less than 1% of all Doctorate graduates in Brazil between 1996 and 2008 (0.77%) and less than 0.5% in the sciences area applied and there is no doctorate in economics in the region. That is, 59% of the national territory is a region mostly with low or medium human development, living with the lack of training of qualified labor.
On the other hand, the Amazon is also a frontier of resources and a privileged space for the expansion of Brazilian agricultural, mineral and energy production, aspects that coexist at the same time with one of the regions with the greatest biological diversity on the planet and with the main sources of emissions CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) by changing the country's land use. These contradictions and complexity make the Amazon a privileged space for study, it is not by chance that one of the largest international research and cooperation projects carried out by Brazil in recent years (the large-scale biosphere-atmosphere experiment) focused on the interaction of Amazon with Global Climate.
In the recent global academic debate, the theme of Amazonia appears predominantly only as a factor, or physical component, as a potential generator of instability in the global biogeophysical system. The debate on the economic development of the Amazon, when it exists in contemporary academic literature, has been mostly subordinated to the theme of climate change or biodiversity, and not to the theme of its development. Filling this gap is a clear commitment of the UFPA graduate program in Economics (PPGE-UFPA).