Information Society, Teaching, and Learning: Education Reforms in Brazil

This article examines the subject matter of learning within the context of information society, through an inquiry concerning both the reforms in education adopted in Brazil in the last thirty years and their results. It provides a revision on the explanations of school failure based on assumptions of learning problems due to cognitive and linguistic deficits. From the guidelines related with written school forms as well as the constant cultural oppression accomplished inside the school, the article claims the necessity of changing the psychological and pedagogic views that, under the label of democratic practices, determine school institutions and its daily life, by means of instrumental relations with knowledge that disregard the reading practices which are congenial to popular culture.

Structural change, balance-of-payments constraint, and economic growth: evidence from the multisectoral Thirlwall`s law

This paper contributes to the literature on balance-of-payments constrained growth by investigating how structural change identified with changes in the sectoral composition of exports and imports affects the external constraint We test both the original and a multisectoral version of Thirlwall`s law for a sample of Latin American and Asian countries The original Thirlwall s law is found to hold for all sample countries except South Korea, whereas the multisectoral analogue holds for all of them As the sectoral composition of exports and imports is found to matter for growth we analyze the evolution of each country`s weighted trade income elasticities

Import substitution and economic growth

Despite Latin America`s dismal performance between the 1950s and 1980s, the region experienced strong capital deepening. We suggest that these facts can be explained as a consequence of the restrictive trade regime adopted at that time. Our framework is based on a dynamic Heckscher-Ohlin model, with scale economies in the capital-intensive sector. Initially, the economy is open and produces only the labor-intensive good. The trade regime is modeled as a move to a closed economy. The model produces results consistent with the Latin American experience. Specifically, a Sufficiently small Country experiences no long-run income growth, but an increase in capital. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The economic determinants of the Brazilian nominal term structure of interest rates

The purpose of this study is to identify the effects of monetary policy and macroeconomic shocks on the dynamics of the Brazilian term structure of interest rates. We estimate a near-VAR model under the identification scheme proposed by Christiano et al. (1996, 1999). The results resemble those of the US economy: monetary policy shocks that flatten the term structure of interest rates. We find that monetary policy shocks in Brazil explain a significantly larger share of the dynamics of the term structure than in the USA. Finally, we analyse the importance of standard macroeconomic variables (e. g. GDP, inflation and measure of country risk) to the dynamics of the term structure in Brazil.

Petroleum royalties and regional development in Brazil: The economic growth of recipient towns

In 1997, Brazil approved law n(cr) 9478, establishing new rules for sharing petroleum royalties with Brazilian municipalities. The goal of this paper is to evaluate whether royalties distributed under the new law have contributed for the development of benefited municipalities. For that the difference-indifferences estimator (diff-in-diff) is used, which compares the evolution of the economic product into the municipality affected by the new law with the unaffected ones, by exploring the new legislation as an exogenous change. The data refer to the municipal gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate before and after the event. Results are surprising, showing that royalty receivers grew less than municipalities that did not receive such resources. The difference is small but statistically significant. In general, an increase of one real in royalties per capita reduces the growth rate of the municipal product in 0.002 percentile points. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Assessing the ex ante economic impacts of transportation infrastructure policies in Brazil

This paper uses a fully operational inter-regional computable general equilibrium (CGE) model implemented for the Brazilian economy, based on previous work by Haddad and Hewings, in order to assess the likely economic effects of road transportation policy changes in Brazil. Among the features embedded in this framework, modelling of external scale economies and transportation costs provides an innovative way of dealing explicitly with theoretical issues related to integrated regional systems. The model is calibrated for 109 regions. The explicit modelling of transportation costs built into the inter-regional CGE model, based on origin-destination flows, which takes into account the spatial structure of the Brazilian economy, creates the capability of integrating the inter-regional CGE model with a geo-coded transportation network model enhancing the potential of the framework in understanding the role of infrastructure on regional development. The transportation model used is the so-called Highway Development and Management, developed by the World Bank, implemented using the software TransCAD. Further extensions of the current model specification for integrating other features of transport planning in a continental industrialising country like Brazil are discussed, with the goal of building a bridge between conventional transport planning practices and the innovative use of CGE models. In order to illustrate the analytical power of the integrated system, the authors present a set of simulations, which evaluate the ex ante economic impacts of physical/qualitative changes in the Brazilian road network (for example, a highway improvement), in accordance with recent policy developments in Brazil. Rather than providing a critical evaluation of this debate, they intend to emphasise the likely structural impacts of such policies. They expect that the results will reinforce the need to better specifying spatial interactions in inter-regional CGE models.

Visiting-economists through Hirschman`s eyes

Since the nineteenth century, Latin America and other poor areas of the world received periodical visits from missions of economic experts. This paper analyzes the picture that Hirschman draws of these money doctors, whose main task was to advise on the economic and financial reforms that were deemed necessary for economic development. Hirschman coins the expression `visiting-economist syndrome` to criticize the work done by these money doctors. I discuss whether Hirschman, as a money doctor himself, was able to acquire immunity from the disease he feared.

An analysis of US greenhouse gas cap-and-trade proposals using a forward-looking economic model

We develop a forward-looking version of the recursive dynamic MIT Emissions Prediction and Policy Analysis (EPPA) model, and apply it to examine the economic implications of proposals in the US Congress to limit greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We find that shocks in the consumption path are smoothed out in the forward-looking model and that the lifetime welfare cost of GHG policy is lower than in the recursive model, since the forward-looking model can fully optimize over time. The forward-looking model allows us to explore issues for which it is uniquely well suited, including revenue-recycling and early action crediting. We find capital tax recycling to be more welfare-cost reducing than labor tax recycling because of its long-term effect on economic growth. Also, there are substantial incentives for early action credits; however, when spread over the full horizon of the policy they do not have a substantial effect on lifetime welfare costs.

Economic performance of Brazilian manufacturing firms: a counterfactual analysis of innovation impacts

This article assesses if innovators outperform non-innovators in Brazilian manufacturing during 1996-2002. To do so, we begin with a simple theoretical model and test the impacts of technological innovation (treatment) on innovating firms (treated) by employing propensity score matching techniques. Correcting for the survivorship bias in the period, it was verified that, on an average, the accomplishment of technological innovations produces positive and significant impacts on the employment, the net revenue, the labor productivity, the capital productivity, and market share of the firms. However, this result was not observed for the mark-up. Especially, the net revenue reflects more robustly the impacts of the innovations. Quantitatively speaking, innovating firms experienced a 10.8-12.5 percentage points (p.p. henceforth) higher growth on employment, a 18.1-21.7 p.p. higher growth on the net revenue, a 10.8-11.9 p.p. higher growth on labor productivity, a 11.8-12.0 p.p. higher growth on capital productivity, and a 19.9-24.3 p.p. higher growth on their market share, relative to the average of the non-innovating firms in the control group. It was also observed that the conjunction of product and process innovations, relative to other forms of innovation, presents the stronger impacts on the performance of Brazilian firms.

Contextual politics of service delivery reforms: Lessons from Delhi, Mexico city and Sao Paulo comparison

Little attention has been given to the contextual politics of service delivery reforms. By focusing on cases of reform in the healthcare sector and, to a lesser extent, in the main policies in the social service sector in India, Mexico and Brazil, this article explores two dimensions of analysis which have enormous relevance in understanding the reach and effectiveness of service delivery reforms: (1) the historical timing of reforms and sectorial baselines, and (2) the degree and institutional locus of local discretion in policy. Findings show that depending on both dimensions, there is an extraordinary variation as to the degree, interests involved and meaning of changes which, in theory, correspond to these countries` commitment to the service delivery reforms, However, consideration of the contextual politics is relevant not for the sake of diversity but for the similarities that this diversity reveals, pointing to underlying analytic dimensions that receive attention in this article.