Three essays on local demand for public services

Local provision of public services has the positive effect of increasing the efficiency because each locality has its idiosyncrasies that determine a particular demand for public services. This dissertation addresses different aspects of the local demand for public goods and services and their relationship with political incentives. The text is divided in three essays. The first essay aims to test the existence of yardstick competition in education spending using panel data from Brazilian municipalities. The essay estimates two-regime spatial Durbin models with time and spatial fixed effects using maximum likelihood, where the regimes represent different electoral and educational accountability institutional settings. First, it is investigated whether the lame duck incumbents tend to engage in less strategic interaction as a result of the impossibility of reelection, which lowers the incentives for them to signal their type (good or bad) to the voters by mimicking their neighbors’ expenditures. Additionally, it is evaluated whether the lack of electorate support faced by the minority governments causes the incumbents to mimic the neighbors’ spending to a greater extent to increase their odds of reelection. Next, the essay estimates the effects of the institutional change introduced by the disclosure on April 2007 of the Basic Education Development Index (known as IDEB) and its goals on the strategic interaction at the municipality level. This institutional change potentially increased the incentives for incumbents to follow the national best practices in an attempt to signal their type to voters, thus reducing the importance of local information spillover. The same model is also tested using school inputs that are believed to improve students’ performance in place of education spending. The results show evidence for yardstick competition in education spending. Spatial auto-correlation is lower among the lame ducks and higher among the incumbents with minority support (a smaller vote margin). In addition, the institutional change introduced by the IDEB reduced the spatial interaction in education spending and input-setting, thus diminishing the importance of local information spillover. The second essay investigates the role played by the geographic distance between the poor and non-poor in the local demand for income redistribution. In particular, the study provides an empirical test of the geographically limited altruism model proposed in Pauly (1973), incorporating the possibility of participation costs associated with the provision of transfers (Van de Wale, 1998). First, the discussion is motivated by allowing for an “iceberg cost” of participation in the programs for the poor individuals in Pauly’s original model. Next, using data from the 2000 Brazilian Census and a panel of municipalities based on the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) from 2001 to 2007, all the distance-related explanatory variables indicate that an increased proximity between poor and non-poor is associated with better targeting of the programs (demand for redistribution). For instance, a 1-hour increase in the time spent commuting by the poor reduces the targeting by 3.158 percentage points. This result is similar to that of Ashworth, Heyndels and Smolders (2002) but is definitely not due to the program leakages. To empirically disentangle participation costs and spatially restricted altruism effects, an additional test is conducted using unique panel data based on the 2004 and 2006 PNAD, which assess the number of benefits and the average benefit value received by beneficiaries. The estimates suggest that both cost and altruism play important roles in targeting determination in Brazil, and thus, in the determination of the demand for redistribution. Lastly, the results indicate that ‘size matters’; i.e., the budget for redistribution has a positive impact on targeting. The third essay aims to empirically test the validity of the median voter model for the Brazilian case. Information on municipalities are obtained from the Population Census and the Brazilian Supreme Electoral Court for the year 2000. First, the median voter demand for local public services is estimated. The bundles of services offered by reelection candidates are identified as the expenditures realized during incumbents’ first term in office. The assumption of perfect information of candidates concerning the median demand is relaxed and a weaker hypothesis, of rational expectation, is imposed. Thus, incumbents make mistakes about the median demand that are referred to as misperception errors. Thus, at a given point in time, incumbents can provide a bundle (given by the amount of expenditures per capita) that differs from median voter’s demand for public services by a multiplicative error term, which is included in the residuals of the demand equation. Next, it is estimated the impact of the module of this misperception error on the electoral performance of incumbents using a selection models. The result suggests that the median voter model is valid for the case of Brazilian municipalities.

Access to knoledge in Brazil: new research on intellectual property, innovation and development

The present volume is the fruit of a research initiative on Access to Knowledge begun in 2004 by Yochai Benkler, Eddan Katz, and myself. Access to Knowledge is both a social movement and an approach to international and domestic policy. In the present era of globalization, intellectual property and information and communications technology are major determinants of wealth and power. The principle of access to knowledge argues that we best serve both human rights and economic development through policies that make knowledge, knowledge-creating tools, and nowledgeembedded goods as widely available as possible for decentralized innovation and use. Open technological standards, a balanced approach to intellectual property rights, and expansion of an open telecommunications infrastructure enable ordinary people around the world to benefit from the technological advances of the information age and allow them to generate a vibrant, participatory and democratic culture. Law plays a crucial role in securing access to knowledge, determining whether knowledge and knowledge goods are shared widely for the benefit of all, or controlled and monopolized for the benefit of a few.

Re-framing risk transfer to assess integrative partnership opportunities: the S.A.R. approach and the AIG/BID/CNO regional surety bond facility of 2007

Identificar, compartilhar e gerenciar os riscos de contratar são preocupações que impedem o estabelicmento e a administração das Parcerias Públicos Particulares (PPP). Porem, gerentes das entidades públicas, bancos de formento, construtoras e seguradoras pesquisam e utilizam muitas técnicas para enfrentar a avaliação e gerenciamento dos riscos. A transferência de risco é uma indicação dos chamados benefícios que são inspirados pelos PPP, contudo devido às realidades contratuais e conceptuais, a entidade de cede o risco (o partido público) permanece quase sempre como o portador final do risco. Conseqüentemente, o partido público retem um interesse de resistência na gerência total destes riscos cedidos. Esta dissertação explora alguns defeitos das aproximações comuns a conceituar a gestão de risco no contexto de um PPP. Focalizando os conceitos da interdependência e da reciprocidade e usando na decisão para transferir o risco do projeto, esta dissertação molda a decisão para transferir o risco nos termos das realidades interdependentes de relacionamentos sistemáticos, alargam os conceitos técnicos do risco e da avaliação de risco, considerando o uso reflexivo das diferenças na analise de um estudo de caso. O autor explora estes conceitos em uma análise da decisão de um gerente de risco da empresa de construção civil brasileira Construtora Norberto Odebrecht (ODB) para projetar uma facilidade inovadora da ligação de garantia com Inter-American Development Bank (BID) e uma seguradora, American International Group (AIG), um negócio que ganhe o reconhecimento Trade Finance Magazine’s 2007 deal of the year. O autor mostra que por compreender a transferência de risco nos termos abordados nesta dissertação, um atore que transfere o risco pode identificar e criar mais oportunidades de estabelecer relacionamentos em longo prazo, através dos processos que a literatura atual do PPP ainda não considere. Os resultados devem fornecer contribuições para a pesquisas sobre a transferência do risco do projeto, na cooperação entre organizações e na seleção do sócio do projeto do potencial.

Development, progress and economic growth

Progress was an idea of the 18th century; development, a project of the 20th century that continues into the 21st century. Progress was associated with the advance of reason, development with the fulfillment of the five political objectives that modern societies set for themselves: security, freedom, economic well-being, social justice and protection of the environment. Today we can view progress and development as equivalent. Both were products of the capitalist revolution, and of the economic development that began with it. Economic development or growth, in its turn, is the process of capital accumulation with the incorporation of technical progress that, mainly through productive sophistication and the increase of the value of labor, increases wages and improves standards of living. The five objectives that define development, as well as the three social instances existing in society change in an interdependent way.