The motive ideas behind three industrialization processes

Includes bibliography

Relative prices in Latin America in periods of low inflation and structural change

Includes bibliography

Portrait of the economist as a young man: Raúl Prebisch's evolving views on the business cycle and money, 1919-1949

Includes bibliography

Aspectos evolucionários das unidades de produção camponesas do território Manaus e entorno

Nesta tese, aborda-se os processos de mudança e diversificação dos sistemas produtivos camponeses localizados em uma parte do Território Manaus e Entorno. O objetivo da pesquisa é a compreensão dos processos de mudança econômica e tecnológica em curso nestes sistemas produtivos. A abordagem do tema é realizada através de uma estrutura analítica multidisciplinar envolvendo conceito da teoria econômica evolucionária, da teoria do desenvolvimento endógeno, da antropologia econômica e da teoria do investimento camponês. Os resultados encontrados revelam que os sistemas produtivos estudados são diversificados em relação aos territórios onde ocorrem. Essa diversificação decorre do modo como os produtores camponeses adaptam seus sistemas produtivos alterando as rotinas de trabalho que os constituem em função das injunções provenientes do ambiente institucional complexo e da dinâmica dos ecossistemas. Tais adaptações são orientadas pelas características socioculturais inerentes às famílias camponesas e motivadas pela busca da eficiência reprodutiva. Ao final, os dados da pesquisa de campo são processados através da Análise Fatorial, revelando diferenciações de trajetórias de sistemas produtivos semelhantes em territórios distintos, bem como agrupamentos que posicionam os produtores camponeses entre situações de integração ao mercado e subsistência subsidiada por benefícios sociais e previdenciários. Esses resultados evidenciam a complexidade da socioeconomia camponesa e suas diversas estratégias de inovação adaptativa.

Inovação e mudanças na realidade amazônica: o caso da pesca no município paraense de Vigia de Nazaré

Neste artigo, discute-se a inovação, considerada pela teoria econômica evolucionista como a força motriz do desenvolvimento, por promover um dinamismo econômico capaz de mudar cenários antes sem quaisquer perspectivas de mudança, principalmente em regiões pouco desenvolvidas ou quase sem nenhum grau de desenvolvimento. Constata-se que isso tem acontecido no município de Vigia de Nazaré (PA), especialmente no setor industrial da pesca. A adoção de inovações tem causado transformações no comportamento dos agentes privados e públicos, havendo expectativas positivas quanto ao futuro do setor e do próprio município. Acredita-se que um incremento institucional pode gerar um ambiente favorável à sustentabilidade da atividade e do próprio desenvolvimento local, podendo-se estender o modelo para as esferas estadual e regional.

O grupo cervejeiro nacional petrópolis na evolução do capitalismo brasileiro: concorrência e expansão territorial

The processes resulting from globalization are backdrop for the work. On the other hand the Regulation Theory is theoretical north that drives research directions. Considering these two basis, we studied the formation of economic groups as a consequence of the processes of concentration and centralization of capital, giving more emphasis on their national character. We see how they went through the restructuring process in the transition from Fordist accumulation regime to a flexible system of accumulation. We 'll discuss the brewery industry and how major industry groups are currently creating a sector overview, ranging from the productive process to the forms of competition among large companies. Specifically we will see the Petrópolis Group this framework and how the company relates to the territory, and what answers we have of this relationship in terms of local development in the territories where the group entered, and territorial changes which have occurred there

Análise quantitativa de demanda em uma empresa siderúrgica

Companies, in general, operate due to the work of its subsystems and this is possible thanks to operational planning that tries to promote the best way to integrate them without giving up the mission, vision and values of the company. The main purpose of a business is to serve customers, but to be successful must take into account other factors such as survival, profitability, growth and operational standpoint to use their resources effectively. The use of tools to support the process of analysis of management decision-making is gaining importance in the context of competitiveness in the world market. The objective of this paper is to present a simulation of the process of forecasting demand to obtain optimal results for a steel company, compare the actual results with order entry and assess the magnitude of the error

Essays on the political economy of European integration

Recently, a rising interest in political and economic integration/disintegration issues has been developed in the political economy field. This growing strand of literature partly draws on traditional issues of fiscal federalism and optimum public good provision and focuses on a trade-off between the benefits of centralization, arising from economies of scale or externalities, and the costs of harmonizing policies as a consequence of the increased heterogeneity of individual preferences in an international union or in a country composed of at least two regions. This thesis stems from this strand of literature and aims to shed some light on two highly relevant aspects of the political economy of European integration. The first concerns the role of public opinion in the integration process; more precisely, how economic benefits and costs of integration shape citizens' support for European Union (EU) membership. The second is the allocation of policy competences among different levels of government: European, national and regional. Chapter 1 introduces the topics developed in this thesis by reviewing the main recent theoretical developments in the political economy analysis of integration processes. It is structured as follows. First, it briefly surveys a few relevant articles on economic theories of integration and disintegration processes (Alesina and Spolaore 1997, Bolton and Roland 1997, Alesina et al. 2000, Casella and Feinstein 2002) and discusses their relevance for the study of the impact of economic benefits and costs on public opinion attitude towards the EU. Subsequently, it explores the links existing between such political economy literature and theories of fiscal federalism, especially with regard to normative considerations concerning the optimal allocation of competences in a union. Chapter 2 firstly proposes a model of citizens’ support for membership of international unions, with explicit reference to the EU; subsequently it tests the model on a panel of EU countries. What are the factors that influence public opinion support for the European Union (EU)? In international relations theory, the idea that citizens' support for the EU depends on material benefits deriving from integration, i.e. whether European integration makes individuals economically better off (utilitarian support), has been common since the 1970s, but has never been the subject of a formal treatment (Hix 2005). A small number of studies in the 1990s have investigated econometrically the link between national economic performance and mass support for European integration (Eichenberg and Dalton 1993; Anderson and Kalthenthaler 1996), but only making informal assumptions. The main aim of Chapter 2 is thus to propose and test our model with a view to providing a more complete and theoretically grounded picture of public support for the EU. Following theories of utilitarian support, we assume that citizens are in favour of membership if they receive economic benefits from it. To develop this idea, we propose a simple political economic model drawing on the recent economic literature on integration and disintegration processes. The basic element is the existence of a trade-off between the benefits of centralisation and the costs of harmonising policies in presence of heterogeneous preferences among countries. The approach we follow is that of the recent literature on the political economy of international unions and the unification or break-up of nations (Bolton and Roland 1997, Alesina and Wacziarg 1999, Alesina et al. 2001, 2005a, to mention only the relevant). The general perspective is that unification provides returns to scale in the provision of public goods, but reduces each member state’s ability to determine its most favoured bundle of public goods. In the simple model presented in Chapter 2, support for membership of the union is increasing in the union’s average income and in the loss of efficiency stemming from being outside the union, and decreasing in a country’s average income, while increasing heterogeneity of preferences among countries points to a reduced scope of the union. Afterwards we empirically test the model with data on the EU; more precisely, we perform an econometric analysis employing a panel of member countries over time. The second part of Chapter 2 thus tries to answer the following question: does public opinion support for the EU really depend on economic factors? The findings are broadly consistent with our theoretical expectations: the conditions of the national economy, differences in income among member states and heterogeneity of preferences shape citizens’ attitude towards their country’s membership of the EU. Consequently, this analysis offers some interesting policy implications for the present debate about ratification of the European Constitution and, more generally, about how the EU could act in order to gain more support from the European public. Citizens in many member states are called to express their opinion in national referenda, which may well end up in rejection of the Constitution, as recently happened in France and the Netherlands, triggering a European-wide political crisis. These events show that nowadays understanding public attitude towards the EU is not only of academic interest, but has a strong relevance for policy-making too. Chapter 3 empirically investigates the link between European integration and regional autonomy in Italy. Over the last few decades, the double tendency towards supranationalism and regional autonomy, which has characterised some European States, has taken a very interesting form in this country, because Italy, besides being one of the founding members of the EU, also implemented a process of decentralisation during the 1970s, further strengthened by a constitutional reform in 2001. Moreover, the issue of the allocation of competences among the EU, the Member States and the regions is now especially topical. The process leading to the drafting of European Constitution (even if then it has not come into force) has attracted much attention from a constitutional political economy perspective both on a normative and positive point of view (Breuss and Eller 2004, Mueller 2005). The Italian parliament has recently passed a new thorough constitutional reform, still to be approved by citizens in a referendum, which includes, among other things, the so called “devolution”, i.e. granting the regions exclusive competence in public health care, education and local police. Following and extending the methodology proposed in a recent influential article by Alesina et al. (2005b), which only concentrated on the EU activity (treaties, legislation, and European Court of Justice’s rulings), we develop a set of quantitative indicators measuring the intensity of the legislative activity of the Italian State, the EU and the Italian regions from 1973 to 2005 in a large number of policy categories. By doing so, we seek to answer the following broad questions. Are European and regional legislations substitutes for state laws? To what extent are the competences attributed by the European treaties or the Italian Constitution actually exerted in the various policy areas? Is their exertion consistent with the normative recommendations from the economic literature about their optimum allocation among different levels of government? The main results show that, first, there seems to be a certain substitutability between EU and national legislations (even if not a very strong one), but not between regional and national ones. Second, the EU concentrates its legislative activity mainly in international trade and agriculture, whilst social policy is where the regions and the State (which is also the main actor in foreign policy) are more active. Third, at least two levels of government (in some cases all of them) are significantly involved in the legislative activity in many sectors, even where the rationale for that is, at best, very questionable, indicating that they actually share a larger number of policy tasks than that suggested by the economic theory. It appears therefore that an excessive number of competences are actually shared among different levels of government. From an economic perspective, it may well be recommended that some competences be shared, but only when the balance between scale or spillover effects and heterogeneity of preferences suggests so. When, on the contrary, too many levels of government are involved in a certain policy area, the distinction between their different responsibilities easily becomes unnecessarily blurred. This may not only leads to a slower and inefficient policy-making process, but also risks to make it too complicate to understand for citizens, who, on the contrary, should be able to know who is really responsible for a certain policy when they vote in national,local or European elections or in referenda on national or European constitutional issues.

The Effectiveness of the Clean Development Mechanism – A law and economics analysis

Climate change has been acknowledged as a threat to humanity. Most scholars agree that to avert dangerous climate change and to transform economies into low-carbon societies, deep global emission reductions are required by the year 2050. Under the framework of the Kyoto Protocol, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is the only market-based instrument that encourages industrialised countries to pursue emission reductions in developing countries. The CDM aims to pay the incremental finance necessary to operationalize emission reduction projects which are otherwise not financially viable. According to the objectives of the Kyoto Protocol, the CDM should finance projects that are additional to those which would have happened anyway, contribute to sustainable development in the countries hosting the projects, and be cost-effective. To enable the identification of such projects, an institutional framework has been established by the Kyoto Protocol which lays out responsibilities for public and private actors. This thesis examines whether the CDM has achieved these objectives in practice and can thus be considered an effective tool to reduce emissions. To complete this investigation, the book applies economic theory and analyses the CDM from two perspectives. The first perspective is the supply-dimension which answers the question of how, in practice, the CDM system identified additional, cost-effective, sustainable projects and, generated emission reductions. The main contribution of this book is the second perspective, the compliance-dimension, which answers the question of whether industrialised countries effectively used the CDM for compliance with their Kyoto targets. The application of the CDM in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) is used as a case-study. Where the analysis identifies inefficiencies within the supply or the compliance dimension, potential improvements of the legal framework are proposed and discussed.

Three Essays in Economics of Gender

During recent decades, economists' interest in gender-related issues has risen. Researchers aim to show how economic theory can be applied to gender related topics such as peer effect, labor market outcomes, and education. This dissertation aims to contribute to our understandings of the interaction, inequality and sources of differences across genders, and it consists of three empirical papers in the research area of gender economics. The aim of the first paper ("Separating gender composition effect from peer effects in education") is to demonstrate the importance of considering endogenous peer effects in order to identify gender composition effect. This fact is analytically illustrated by employing Manski's (1993) linear-in-means model. The paper derives an innovative solution to the simultaneous identification of endogenous and exogenous peer effects: gender composition effect of interest is estimated from auxiliary reduced-form estimates after identifying the endogenous peer effect by using Graham (2008) variance restriction method. The paper applies this methodology to two different data sets from American and Italian schools. The motivation of the second paper ("Gender differences in vulnerability to an economic crisis") is to analyze the different effect of recent economic crisis on the labor market outcome of men and women. Using triple differences method (before-after crisis, harder-milder hit sectors, men-women) the paper used British data at the occupation level and shows that men suffer more than women in terms of probability of losing their job. Several explanations for the findings are proposed. The third paper ("Gender gap in educational outcome") is concerned with a controversial academic debate on the existence, degree and origin of the gender gap in test scores. The existence of a gap both in mean scores and the variability around the mean is documented and analyzed. The origins of the gap are investigated by looking at wide range of possible explanations.

Electroencephalographic topography measures of experienced utility

Economic theory distinguishes two concepts of utility: decision utility, objectively quantifiable by choices, and experienced utility, referring to the satisfaction by an obtainment. To date, experienced utility is typically measured with subjective ratings. This study intended to quantify experienced utility by global levels of neuronal activity. Neuronal activity was measured by means of electroencephalographic (EEG) responses to gain and omission of graded monetary rewards at the level of the EEG topography in human subjects. A novel analysis approach allowed approximating psychophysiological value functions for the experienced utility of monetary rewards. In addition, we identified the time windows of the event-related potentials (ERP) and the respective intracortical sources, in which variations in neuronal activity were significantly related to the value or valence of outcomes. Results indicate that value functions of experienced utility and regret disproportionally increase with monetary value, and thus contradict the compressing value functions of decision utility. The temporal pattern of outcome evaluation suggests an initial (∼250 ms) coarse evaluation regarding the valence, concurrent with a finer-grained evaluation of the value of gained rewards, whereas the evaluation of the value of omitted rewards emerges later. We hypothesize that this temporal double dissociation is explained by reward prediction errors. Finally, a late, yet unreported, reward-sensitive ERP topography (∼500 ms) was identified. The sources of these topographical covariations are estimated in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the medial frontal gyrus, the anterior and posterior cingulate cortex and the hippocampus/amygdala. The results provide important new evidence regarding “how,” “when,” and “where” the brain evaluates outcomes with different hedonic impact.

Book Review of “Human Behaviour and the Social Environment: Models, Metaphors, and Maps for Applying Theoretical Perspectives to Practice”. 640 pages, Thomson Brooks/Cole, 2007, by James A. Forte

This voluminous book which draws on almost 1000 references provides an important theoretical base for practice. After an informative introduction about models, maps and metaphors, Forte provides an impressive presentation of several perspectives for use in practice; applied ecological theory, applied system theory, applied biology, applied cognitive science, applied psychodynamic theory, applied behaviourism, applied symbolic interactionism, applied social role theory, applied economic theory, and applied critical theory. Finally he completes his book with a chapter on “Multi theory practice and routes to integration.”

Egalitarianism under Earmark Constraints

Agents with single-peaked preferences share a resource coming from different suppliers; each agent is connected to only a subset of suppliers. Examples include workload balancing, sharing earmarked funds, and rationing utilities after a storm. Unlike in the one supplier model, in a Pareto optimal allocation agents who get more than their peak from underdemanded suppliers, coexist with agents who get less from overdemanded suppliers. Our Egalitarian solution is the Lorenz dominant Pareto optimal allocation. It treats agents with equal demands as equally as the connectivity constraints allow. Together, Strategyproofness, Pareto Optimality, and Equal Treatment of Equals, characterize our solution.

Monopsony Power, Pay Structure and Training

Although interest in monopsonistic influences on labor market outcomes has revived in recent years, only a few empirical studies provide direct evidence on this topic. In this article, the authors analyze the effect of monopsony power on pay structure, using a direct measure of labor market thinness. The authors find evidence of monopsony power, as firms facing fewer local competitors offer lower wages to skilled labor and trainees, but not to unskilled labor. The findings have important implications for the economic theory of training, as most recent models assume monopsonistic pay-setting for skilled labor, but not for trainees.