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This paper analyses the role played by US economic assistance during the administrations of Jânio Quadros and João Goulart in Brazil (1961–4). It focuses on the negotiation and implementation of financial agreements associated with the Alliance for Progress, President Kennedy's aid programme for Latin America. It demonstrates that the Alliance had a positive impact during Quadros' administration, providing substantial resources to the country and placing economic growth ahead of economic stabilisation as the principal criterion for aid. Circumstances changed, however, when João Goulart became president, resulting in serious funding constraints. The paper suggests that the main reason for this was political, specifically regarding Washington's perception of Goulart's links with communist groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this paper is to analyze the relation between economic growth and labor market dynamics in Brazil between 1981 and 2009, making a comparison with the United States. Among the findings, one can mention that economic growth in Brazil has been related to a massive incorporation of labor force in labor intensive activities, whereas, in the United States, to a substantial improvement of labor productivity in high-technology activities. Despite the favorable economic context in the 2000s, huge inequalities between these countries have widened since the structure of the Brazilian labor market remained with few or no changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper studies the effects of oil price shocks in the last 30years on the Brazilian and American inflation rate and rhythm of economic activity. The Brazilian and the United States economies are interesting polar cases, since they had a completely different path on the oil import dependence rate. While the oil import dependence rate has increase sharply in the United States (US), it has decreased substantially in Brazil. We found that output growth volatility in the United States has been decreasing over time as well as the contribution of oil price shocks to such volatility, despite the increase in oil import dependence. Inflation volatility has also been decreasing but oil price shocks are accounting for a larger fraction of this volatility in the US. In Brazil, such shocks do not seem to have a clear impact on output growth and they account for a very small fraction of the Brazilian inflation and output growth rate volatility. We finally run some counterfactual experiments to analyze how real output growth in the United States would had been if net oil import share in the United States behaved similarly to what was observed in Brazil. We conclude that output level would be roughly the same, however, it would be about 10% less volatile if the US had the actual Brazilian oil import share. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper submits to critique the Brazilian proposal to create a new paradigm for international cooperation from its role in MINUSTAH. We compare some aspects of Brazilian projects in Haiti with U.S. projects. We analyzed documents of the Brazilian Cooperation Agency (ABC) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]