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In 2003, the federal government launched the Bolsa Família program that is to financially assist low-income families with the condition that they keep children in school and vaccinated. The main objective of the program is to fight poverty and help build a more just socially country. Recent research shows that the program has brought positive impacts to society, but at the same time, it has a very high cost, which leads many to doubt their real effectiveness. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the program in health and number of hours worked of the Brazilian women. The econometric methods Propensity Score Matching and Heckman show that the program has positive impact on improving health and reducing the number of hours worked of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to identify and describe the new-classics, which area considered to be the creators of the inflation targeting model and to criticize its adoption in Brazil through a post keynesian augmentation. The analysis will be specific for the Brazilian Model starting at its implementation on 1999, with more focus on President Fernando Henrique Cardoso's government. The matters of independency versus autonomy of the Country's central Bank, a theoretical discussion regarding the execution of the monetary policy and its relationship with the success of the proposed plan and an overview of the post keynesian scholars and its ideas regarding monetary policies will be discussed as it follows [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main objective of this paper is to present a vision of the Second National Development Plan (II PND) undertaken in Brazil in the 1970s, in the context of the international crisis triggered by the shock of oil prices. It seeks to clarify the historical conditions within which the II PND has been designed and trace its main lines of action. Also presented is a debate grounded in classical interpretations about the period, with the intent to suggest that this development plan, although it presented some problematic aspects -- especially regarding ways of financing the projects --, had an economic rationality that would be important for recovery Brazilian economy in the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary sector in Brazil is of great importance for the national economy and the rice farming in Rio Grande do Sul is also important in this context because of its numerous producers. This paper aims at proving that the rice imported from Mercosur and the local production influence the internal price and that the relations between variables occur in a curvilinear way and cannot be analyzed by means of linear methods. Thus, it was used descriptive statistics, analysis of correlation and models of linear, semi-logarithmic, quadratic and cubic regression. The results indicate that there are influences between variables and that the relations are linear for production and price and curvilinear for imports and prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this work is to identify if there was some link between the use of foreign savings and the deterioration of indicators of external vulnerability in the period preceding the exchange crises in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, which occurred between 1994 and 2001. For that, one needs to provide a brief theoretical discussion on the issue of external vulnerability and the ways to measure it, in order to establish the possible relations between this and the use of foreign savings. Among the methodological procedures needed to develop this work, let us first point out the gathering of data from the countries analyzed; these data are: national accounts, net foreign debt, short-term external debt, external debt service, exports of goods and services, international reserves, and GDP, which were obtained from international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These data allowed us to calculate different indicators of vulnerability, as the ratios external debt/exports, reserves/foreign debt, the debt service/exports, and the debt service/GDP, in order to make a comparative analysis of the economies involved. It is important to highlight that the economies analyzed had in common the indiscriminate use of foreign savings in the periods that preceded their respective crises. However, the economic growth of the countries in that period was negligible when compared to the average growth of the emerging economies. The study shows it is due to the fact that these countries did not direct the bulk of capital raised abroad to the productive sector, as evidenced by the low proportion of gross fixed capital formation in relation to GDP in that period. The data analyzed also reveal a deterioration of indicators of external vulnerability in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. The paper concludes that this deterioration is associated to the way of using foreign savings, since they replaced the domestic savings instead of complementing them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Brazilian economy maintained high inflation rates since the 1980s and it was in need of an economic plan able to control the raising of prices, something that happened with the advent of Plano Real, which found, also, in the exchange regime a way of fighting the economic instability . Until 1999, the government maintained a regime of managed exchange, when it was replaced by a regime of "dirty" fluctuation. The regimes of exchange have a direct effect on the real exchange rates and these, it is believed, on the national exports. The aim of this paper was to investigate if there is some influence of the real exchange rate on agricultural exports in the post-Real period. We used dynamic econometric models and graphic analyses, obtained through the softwares Gretl (1.7.4) and MS Excel. We concluded the real exchange rate exerts influence on agricultural exports in a dynamic perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to verify the occurred economic dynamism and the concentration economic of productive activities in the Brazilian South Region. The main results disclose that for the Brazilian South Region, the process of spatial concentration for economic activities it made possible the sprouting of news economic centers, intensification of the process of demographic growth around of these and identification of the regional vocations. However, the concentration did not dynamism the southern economy as a whole, allowing that isolated regions of the states reached the development, while others had remained stagnated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The agribusiness in Brazil has advanced significantly and gained importance in national economy in recent years. Within this sector of the economy has been power the beef cattle, around one third of the total value of production, particularly the export sector of beef. In this optimistic scenario, this paper aims to identify the best option for road transport by type of vehicle or the best among all the options available to minimize the costs of the whole process of export of meat from a refrigerator located in city of Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul, destined to the ports of Santos and Guarujá, state of São Paulo. The technique used was the linear programming and, among the results, the best option is to increase its offer refrigerator to minimize the costs of transport. By adopting this solution, there is not inventory or the possibility of under-utilization of carrier vehicle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the global trading volume of credit derivatives has exceeded tenths of trillions of dollars, the market in Brazil for these instruments is still incipient. But, with the proposal of the Brazilian Mercantile and Futures Exchange (BM&F) to allow the trading of Credit Default Swaps (CDS) futures in 2008, the enhancement and consolidation of credit derivatives in the Brazilian market is likely. Credit derivatives have many uses, including hedging and leveraging of credit exposures, exploitation of market imbalances and adequacy of portfolio to capital requirements. Thus, considering the uses of these financial instruments e considering their increasing trading volume, this paper aims to present some characteristics and models to analyze credit derivatives, and specifically, Credit Default Swaps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a cost-benefit analysis of a hypothetical project for converting urban diesel buses into compressed natural gas (CNG) in the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo (MRSP). Environmental valuation techniques were used to estimate the benefits of the air quality improvement due to fuel switch, due to the reduction of particulate matter (PM10) concentration. The costs of the project were calculated by the costs of converting diesel buses into CNG. The results show that the social benefits from the project largely exceed the conversion costs, thus indicating that it would contribute significantly to the welfare of the affected population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main goal of this paper is to evaluate the impact of the exchange rate volatility in price prediction of derivative securities in the Brazilian capital markets using an artificial neural network technique, given the Black & Scholes Model limitations. For this purpose a multiplayer, feedforward neural network, trained by the backpropagation algorithm model, to perform the prediction of the Telemar option prices was developed. The model results show that price estimates are close to the real values, mainly when appended to the exchange rate, confirming that the performance of neural network is superior to other results. The inclusion of the exchange rate in neural networks technique results in a better price forecasting for the options, because the volatility in the price of the underlying asset is caused by temporary arbitrage of quotes among the national and foreign stock markets where the company is listed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main objective of this paper is discussing the neutrality of money facing the post-Keynesian theory with the orthodoxy theory. The formation of expectatives by the agents in an uncertain world, over the period that concerns the adoption of the inflation target in Brazil, is the period about this discussion. Based on in a time series econometrical model, that aims to show whether changes on inflation are used followed on adoption of contracionist monetary policies in order to evidence the non-neutral money character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses environment subject present in public policies for Legal Amazonia, including the Public Forests Management Law (Law 11.284/06), approved with the purpose of regulating public forests management in Brazil and promoting sustainable development. The Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is suggested as a forest conservation mechanism. Through an hypothetical "zero" deforestation scenario and 100% of not emitted carbon linked to forest conservation projects, an economic revenue equivalent to the logging activities was estimated, and could be obtained in carbon market, contributing to maintenance of climatic equilibrium reducing Greenhouse Gases emissions, as well as keeping preserved biodiversity and environment services values related to standing forest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the formation and the development of the tin industry in Brazil, analyzing its linkings with adopted public politics, from the nature deliberate or not, in the second half of century XX. The including in the context of the sector, in national and international scenery, attend the foundling in the current period, demonstrating its vicissitudes, giving it has supported the presented perspectives and conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the performance of a general dynamic equity indexing strategy based on cointegration, from a market efficiency perspective, observing the different levels of risk and regimes. This new portfolio will be compared with Markowitz portfolio model. The identification of these autoregressive regimes in the process of generating returns in the Brazilian Market, especially in Bovespa, for the Plano Real period (January of 1995 to September of 2004), will be elaborated trough a Markov Switching Model. With this model, is possible to identify the nonlinear structure of the data and it is relation to the conditional mean and conditional variance. As result the dynamics of the data generation process, the returns can be described as function of the growth cycle ("bull markets") and decrease ("bear markets"). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the recent trends in, and outlook for, Brazilian outward foreign direct investment (FDI). It shows that outward FDI from Brazil has declined against that from other developing countries and it analyses the prospects for recovery. A survey of the international literature reveals that outward FDI benefits both the investing firm and the home country. It is thus relevant to ask why outward FDI by Brazilian firms is so low. In answer, the article surveys the literature on Brazilian outward FDI and presents new evidence in terms of the firm (Brazilian firms are small and they prefer the home market), product (commodities are the main export), technology (low innovation rate), industry (Brazilian firms generally belong to mature or competitive sectors) and the economy (unsuitable financial system and high interest rates). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existence and magnitude of risk premiums in the Brazilian term structure is not clear, particularly because it's a market in the process of development. Some year ago the Brazilian Central Bank created a system to measure market expectations for economic indicators, including the interest rates, and then give inputs to the inflation target regime. Nevertheless, if the system really represents "actual" expectations is a question to be answered. These are some of the motivations for this paper, together with the relation between the futures market and collected expectations, the risk premium for public debt securities and the relevance of these topics to public debt management. The main contributions are the measurement of the term structure of the risk premium in the Brazilian market, using the Kalman filter, and an estimation of market expectations. Furthermore, we investigate the expectations collected by the Central Bank and cover other minor topics, such as the determinants of the risk premium and the "government" premium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the efforts of the researchers of the Quality of Life Research Centre (NPQV) who have been interested in searching an objective way of measuring the quality of life of population of São Paulo, one of most important cities of Latin America. To this purpose, it was selected seven dimensions of the quality of life as long as they generate disaggregated information which enable to construct a measure of the quality of life for small geographic units - the "subprefeituras" (e. g. administrative areas of the city). The selected dimensions were: 1. culture and leisure, 2. health, 3. security, 4. education, 5. income and labor, 6. housing and 7. infrastructure and environment. The data sources are Censo 2000 microdata and other official surveys. The Quality of Life Economic Index (IEQV) is a proxy for well-being. In order to obtain the index, it was applied factor analysis which allowed estimating the weight of each dimension. According to this index, it was possible to rank the "subprefeituras" from the lowest to the highest levels of well-being. In this ranking, the "subprefeituras" of Parelheiros, M'Boi Mirim, Cidade Ademar and Socorro had the worst results, whereas Pinheiros, Vila Mariana, Lapa and Santo Amaro shown the best quality of life in relative terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to describe the whole process of transportation of the soybeans produced in State of Mato Grosso and exported through Santos Seaport, and to show that it still exists many deficiencies in the infrastructure of this route, which generates very high costs. First of all, the cost of the highway transportation will be analyzed within the State of Mato Grosso, followed by a survey of the available options' costs to transport the soybeans from Mato Grosso to Santos Seaport where, the embarkment conditions will be discussed at end. The importance of this work resides in the fact that an evaluation of the economic costs was made on a complete chain of transport that includes highway, railroad and ship transportation of an important product of our export list, and because of its physical amount, the costs must be considered as a very important component of the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On this paper, we shall analyze the regulatory alternatives for tariff structure on mobile telecommunications. Initially we will endeavor toreview thes legal norms for the subject, followed by a theoretical review and finally we simulated the Ramsery prices and perfect collusion on Brazilian Telecommunications. We can see the prices corrently recorded are below the ones consistent with the collusion and above the Ramsery prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to exam the Brazilian Textile Industry evolution process in the 1990's. It analyses the specific conditions of Brazilian commercial opening and the intensification of the technological innovation. From statistical information it verifies the impacts of these events on the structure, conduct and performance of the industry. The results show that the impacts of the commercial opening on this sector was more intense than in other industrial sectors what lead to an intense concentration movement in the period and to relevant implication on labor productiveness. The conclusions stress the present favorable perspectives of the Brazilian Textile Industry as to international competitiveness, restricted by specific public policies support and by investments intensification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]