Trade and poverty in latin american countries: conceptual and methodological challenges

This paper addresses topics - either relevant or confusing or needing more attention - related to measuring the trade and poverty nexus. It sheds a critical light on the existing material and suggests needed research lines. It starts with questions akin to the LAC realities; then, keeping this view, general methodological issues are also examined. In a broader perspective, further ideas for the research agenda are formulated. The main conclusion is that relevant findings still demand considerable efforts. Moreover, the Information-measurement-model-evaluation paradigm is not enough, policy guidelines being usually too general. In LAC, it must be extended and deepened, accounting more for the heterogeneity of cases, including, whenever possible, the physical constraints and incorporating new ways of integrating both the local and global perspectives. Other aspects, like the role of specific juridical measures, should play a role. How all this can be combined into more encompassing evaluations remains open

A perceived human development index

The objective of the paper is to build a Perceived Human Development Index (PHDI) framework by assembling the HDI components, namely indicators on income, health and education on their subjective version. We propose here to introduce a fourth dimension linked to perceptions on work conditions, given its role in the “happiness” literature and in social policy making. We study how perceptions on satisfaction about the individual’s satisfaction with income, education, work and health are related to their objective counterparts. We use a sample of LAC countries where we take advantage of a larger set of questions on the four groups of social variables mentioned included in the Gallup World Poll by the IADB. We emphasize the impacts of objective income and age on perceptions. Complementarily, in the appendix we use the full sample of 132 countries where a smaller set of variables can be included, which provides a greater degree of freedom to study the impact of objective HDI components observed at country level on the formation of individual’s perception on income, education, work, health and life satisfaction. These exercises provide useful insights about the workings of beneficiaries’ point of view to understand the transmission mechanism of key social policy ingredients into perceptions. In particular, the so-called PHDI may provide a complementary subjective reference to the HDI. We also study how one’s satisfaction with life is established, measuring the relative importance given to income vis-à-vis health and education. Estimating these “instantaneous happiness functions” will help to assess the relative weights attributed to income, health and education in the HDI, which is a benchmark in the multidimensional social indicators toolbox used in practice.

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.