Economic and financial impacts of the expansion of UNIFAL-MG

This work presents a study on the importance of a federal university as a source of economic and social development in the municipality in which it is located. This study was based on the case of the Federal University of Alfenas (UNIFAL-MG) in the city of Alfenas-MG, mainly between 2002 and 2014. To this end, a quantitative study was carried out to identify which sectors of the economy in the municipality of Alfenas were most affected by the expansion of UNIFAL-MG in the post REUNI period, considering the increase in income and employment in these sectors. Documentary analysis, the RAIS microdata base and closed questionnaires applied to active UNIFAL-MG employees were used to construct the data. The data collected was processed using econometric analysis. To confirm the existence of a relationship between the variables studied, t-tests, Simple Linear Regression tests and the Akaike Information Criterion corrected for small samples (AICc) were carried out. It was possible to verify the importance of a public higher education institution for the economy of a medium-sized city.