Capitalismo de estado e inovação: facetas da relação entre estado e iniciativa privada no desenvolvimento nacional

While countries managed to rapidly rise and recover economically, Brazilian social indicators have advanced at short pace in the last decades. Although millions of Brazilians have recently left poverty, Brazil still has a long way to go regarding its socioeconomic development. Circa one fifth of the population is still considered functionally illiterate, basic education has one of the poorest performances in the world, the country has no top-level universities nor produces technology or patents at relevant levels. This paper, at first, analyses how the interaction between government and private agents influenced Brazil’s industrial and economic development, identifying the existence of bonds based on the exchange of private interests that at great extension kept public policies from reaching goals of national interest – the so called crony capitalism. Secondly, the paper verifies how development policies based on the promotion of innovative companies and segments of the industry may positively impact broad socioeconomic development. The paper delves specifically into the cooperation between universities and industry as a development tool. Enterprises and universities, guided by their endogenous interests, may be combined for the structuring of a national innovation system. While universities are fundamentally interested in promoting knowledge accumulation, enterprises are willing to invest financial capital in universities in exchange for the economic exploitation of products developed within the academic environment and direct access to its human capital. Lastly, the paper identifies the legal and cultural barriers and advances of this mechanism in Brazil. It verifies that, notwithstanding the institutional advance promoted by the Law of Innovation to the university-enterprise cooperation in Brazil, the law wasn’t entirely capable of eliminating the legal uncertainty of this relationship and capturing in an efficient way the interests of the agents involved. Recently, federal law n. 12.863/2013 officially offered universities the option of bypassing problems related to public law by regulating support foundations, which conceives greater certainty and simplicity to the cooperation. There are, however, remaining uncertainties regarding the norms to be edited by the executive power, as well as conflicts of interest linked to the property rights over patents resulting from this kind of cooperation. The paper verifies, moreover, the existence of ideological resistance to this tool within universities, in such a way that it is unlikely that those relationships develop in a systematic way throughout the country without further engagement from the government and its executive and legislative bodies.

A arbitragem nos conflitos envolvendo a administração pública : uma proposta de regulamentação

Em 26 de maio de 2015, foi sancionada a Lei nº 13.129/2015, que promoveu verdadeira reforma na Lei nº 9.307, 23 de setembro de 1996, a Lei de Arbitragem. Dentre as modificações introduzidas no direito arbitral brasileiro, possivelmente a mais importante delas é aquela prevista no § 1º do art. 1º da Lei de Arbitragem, que passou a admitir indistintamente o uso, pelo Estado, da via arbitral para dirimir conflitos relativos a direitos patrimoniais disponíveis, permitindo a inserção da correspondente cláusula compromissória nos contratos administrativos em geral e, inclusive, em convênios, contratos de gestão e termos de cessão e de permissão de uso. A presente dissertação de mestrado tem por objetivo, precisamente, o de permitir uma melhor compreensão do alcance da regra prevista no art. 1º, § 1º, da Lei nº 9.307/96, verdadeiro marco regulatório da arbitragem no setor público, e propor, concretamente, linhas de ação voltadas para fomentar o emprego do procedimento arbitral nos conflitos envolvendo a Administração Pública, em especial a regulamentação do instituto no seio da burocracia estatal.

Homogeneous middles vs. heterogeneous tails, and the end of the ‘Inverted-U’: the share of the rich is what it’s all about

This paper examines the current global scene of distributional disparities within-nations. There are six main conclusions. First, about 80 per cent of the world’s population now live in regions whose median country has a Gini not far from 40. Second, as outliers are now only located among middle-income and rich countries, the ‘upwards’ side of the ‘Inverted-U’ between inequality and income per capita has evaporated (and with it the statistical support there was for the hypothesis that posits that, for whatever reason, ‘things have to get worse before they can get better’). Third, among middle-income countries Latin America and mineral-rich Southern Africa are uniquely unequal, while Eastern Europe follows a distributional path similar to the Nordic countries. Fourth, among rich countries there is a large (and growing) distributional diversity. Fifth, within a global trend of rising inequality, there are two opposite forces at work. One is ‘centrifugal’, and leads to an increased diversity in the shares appropriated by the top 10 and bottom 40 per cent. The other is ‘centripetal’, and leads to a growing uniformity in the income-share appropriated by deciles 5 to 9. Therefore, half of the world’s population (the middle and upper-middle classes) have acquired strong ‘property rights’ over half of their respective national incomes; the other half, however, is increasingly up for grabs between the very rich and the poor. And sixth, Globalisation is thus creating a distributional scenario in which what really matters is the income-share of the rich — because the rest ‘follows’ (middle classes able to defend their shares, and workers with ever more precarious jobs in ever more ‘flexible’ labour markets). Therefore, anybody attempting to understand the within-nations disparity of inequality should always be reminded of this basic distributional fact following the example of Clinton’s campaign strategist: by sticking a note on their notice-boards saying “It’s the share of the rich, stupid”.