Controle social exercido através da denúncia no âmbito do TCE-RJ

The crisis that affected the capitalist states during the last decade of the 20th century, put an end to the period of greatest expansion of the state, demanding alterations that brought, especially in economic terms, the ideals of the liberal state. The main goal of these changes was to optimize the administration of the public service by introducing into it more efficiency, transparency, and morality because the state had shown to be incapable of attending the demands of the society and its way of doing was inefficient and did not reach out to the public interest. In Brazil, like in other part of the world, recent scandals of corruption and misuse of public funds put in doubt the efficiency of the financial control system. Like any other political system Brazil has a complex set of external and internal control, institutions that work to prevent misuse of public funds and identify responsibilities if bad use occurred. All these elements highlight the mechanisms of control of the public administration, which came to be seen as essential instruments for the improvement of the management of the public resources, targeting the collective interest. Therefore, along with the traditional mechanisms of power suppression, such as the system of checks and balances, social control arises. This, when used together with the monitoring exercised by public inspection agencies, is defined as horizontal accountability activated by civil society, in which citizens and institutions gather efforts in order to promote a more effective charge of responsibility from public agents and politicians in case of misconducts. This study aimed to identify the opportunities and limitations of social control exercised by the complaint under the TCE-RJ. The results point to the need to develop measures to guarantee the anonymity of denouncers, to simplify the forms of access the TCE-RJ and to improve information spread to the citizen.

Wald tests for IV regression with weak instruments

This dissertation deals with the problem of making inference when there is weak identification in models of instrumental variables regression. More specifically we are interested in one-sided hypothesis testing for the coefficient of the endogenous variable when the instruments are weak. The focus is on the conditional tests based on likelihood ratio, score and Wald statistics. Theoretical and numerical work shows that the conditional t-test based on the two-stage least square (2SLS) estimator performs well even when instruments are weakly correlated with the endogenous variable. The conditional approach correct uniformly its size and when the population F-statistic is as small as two, its power is near the power envelopes for similar and non-similar tests. This finding is surprising considering the bad performance of the two-sided conditional t-tests found in Andrews, Moreira and Stock (2007). Given this counter intuitive result, we propose novel two-sided t-tests which are approximately unbiased and can perform as well as the conditional likelihood ratio (CLR) test of Moreira (2003).

The optimality of the Friedman rule when some distorting taxes are exogenous

This paper investigates the optimality of the Friedman rule in a two-sector small open economy. That policy prescription is found to be a necessary condition for Pareto efficiency. If a planner can select all conceivable distorting taxes, then, for some initial values of public debt, money balances and foreign assets, it is possible to decentralize a Pareto efficient allocation. If the planner can select only some of these tax rates, then second-best policies may also satisfy the Friedman rule. However, this last result depends on the set of tax instruments the planner can choose from.

The distortion of currencies misalignments on trade Instruments: or why currencies wars are not over

The negotiations of mega agreements between the US and the Pacific countries (TPP) and between the US and the EU (TTIP) are raising the attention of experts on international trade law and economics. TPP and TTIP are proclaimed to be the designers of the rules for the XXI Century. Old trade instruments such as tariffs are said to be no more important for TTIP because tariffs are negligible among those partners but significant to for TPP. Another relevant agreement in negotiation is between the EU and Mercosul, where tariffs are the most important issue in discussion. The main purpose of this paper is to shows that tariff are important for all these agreements, not because of its nominal value, but because the impacts of exchange rate misalignments on tariffs are so significant that all concessions can be distorted by overvalued and by devaluated currencies. The article is divided into several sections: the first gives an introduction to the issue; the second explains the methodologies used to determine exchange rate misalignments and also presents some results for Brazil, US and China; the third summarizes the methodology applied to calculate the impacts of exchange rate misalignments on the level of tariff protection through an exercise of “misalignment tariffication” and examines the effects of exchange rate variations on tariffs and their consequences for the multilateral trading system; the fourth creates a methodology to estimate exchange rates against a basket of currencies (a virtual currency of the World) and a proposal to deal with persistent and significant misalignments related to trade rules. The fifth presents some estimates for the main PTAs. The conclusions are present in the last section