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The article reports on the publishing industry in Brazil as an economic downturn and a declining interest in print magazines causes large publishing houses to downsize. Topics include how growing Internet use in Brazil has caused increased interest in online magazines, a profile of publishing house Editoria Abril, which has downsized after declining revenues in 2013, and concerns that online journalism has impacted the quality of Brazilian news.

The article discusses the effects of Brazil's conditional cash-transfer scheme called Bolsa Bolsa Família. A trio of papers revealed the spillovers of enforcing conditionality for the public welfare scheme which covers the country's 14 million households. The papers examined the behavior of recipients of the scheme and the impact of penalties imposed on parents who failed to meet the scheme's requirements.

Contends that the only thing standing between Brazil and Asia-like rates of economic growth is poor government. How Brazil has changed for the worse; Disintegration of Brazil's society; High inflation rates; Debt; Comments from a paper by Rudiger Dornbusch, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Brazil's resources, including enthusiasm and entrepreneurialism.

Discusses the incoming flow of money in Brazil since big state companies were authorized to seek money abroad. How billions have been raised through commercial paper and Eurocurrency issues by companies like state telephone company Telebras, oil company Petrobras and mining company Companhia Vale do Rio Doce; Details on the opening of stock markets in Rio and Sao Paulo to foreigners for individual shares.

The article discusses how countries such as India and China have shown they can move beyond western imitation to homegrown innovation in certain fields, such as telecommunications and information technology. The same is increasingly true of biotechnology, argues a report just published in Nature Biotechnology by a group at the University of Toronto. The study looks at the state of medical biotechnology in six developing countries--Brazil, China, Cuba, Egypt, India and South Africa--and one recently industrialised one, South Korea, to understand what it takes to build a healthy biotech sector. Many of the countries studied, which began investing in biotech in the 1980s, are starting to see the fruits of their labour. The number of scientific papers on health biotechnology published by researchers in Brazil and Cuba, for example, more than tripled between 1991 and 2002. Much of the biotech industry in the developing world is based on copying western innovation. But such generic manufacturing can be a springboard to more innovative activities. India's pharmaceutical firms are playing an important role in the global fight against AIDS by selling generic versions of anti-retroviral drugs at a fraction of the price charged by their western inventors in the rich world. There are plenty of other hurdles that the countries studied in the report need to tackle before their biotech blossoms fully. Brazil needs better links between academia and industry. Egypt's budding biotechnologists are short of cash from both government and private sources. India's regulatory system is slowing down product development. South Africa needs to do more to reverse its brain drain, and train more researchers to boost their ranks.

In a paper just published in Science, Peter Gordon of Columbia University uses his study of the Pirahã, a group of Brazilian hunter-gatherers who live along the Maici River, and their counting system to investigate a tricky linguistic question. This question was posed by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s. Whorf studied Hopi, an Amerindian language very different from the Eurasian languages that had hitherto been the subject of academic linguistics. His work led him to suggest that language not only influences thought but, more strongly, that it determines thought. Dr Gordon therefore spent a month with the Pirahã and elicited the help of seven of them to see how far their grasp of numbers extended. The Pirahã are a people who have steadfastly resisted assimilation into mainstream Brazilian culture. Their commerce takes the form of barter, with no need to exchange money. Exact numbers do not exist in their language simply because there is no need for them.

This article reports on the risks in investing in emerging-market bonds. Just like Victorian vicars preaching temperance, it is always easy for those who warn of the intoxicating perils of investing in emerging markets to find sad victims, shadows of their former selves, who have fallen prey to the temptation of high-yielding paper. The greatest victims today are holders of bonds issued by the Republic of Argentina. But who listens to such admonitions? Anyone lucky enough to have piled into Brazil's dollar debt in October 2002, the month that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was elected president, at a spread of 23 percentage points over American Treasury bonds, would last month have been able to sell it at a spread of about four points. Brazil had its own story to tell. Brazil's bonds are exceptional only by degree, for those of almost every other emerging market have been blessed of late. A wealth of positive news has driven down spreads: higher commodity prices for developing-country exporters, a buoyant world economy pulled along by a recovering America, and less-profligate governments--all against the benign backdrop of low worldwide interest rates. Developing countries are understandably keen to take advantage of this enthusiasm. So the current bond market has been a playground for emerging-market issuers, but what on earth is now in it for investors? What could pop the bubble?

"Hope" and "history" are two words Brazilians often use in talking of their new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who took office on January 1st, 2003. He has already made history by becoming the first left-winger to be elected to the office, by a landslide; it is a sign of how much Brazil's democracy has matured that nobody is surprised that not a peep has come from the armed forces, who ruled from 1964 to 1985. The hope is that Lula, as he is universally known, who was born poor and came to politics via the factory floor and the picket line, will restore Brazil's economic fortunes in a way that lifts up the poorest in a notoriously unequal society. In an emotional inauguration that drew 100,000 supporters to Brasilia, Lula promised to wage war on hunger and unemployment without upsetting Brazil's fragile finances. He takes charge of a country in financial peril. Brazil's debts frighten its creditors: net public debt is nearly 60% of GDP, some $250 billion, and net foreign debt, both public and private, is $165 billion. Over the past year, fears of default, stoked by Argentina's insolvency and the past radicalism of Lula and his Workers' Party (PT), helped push up interest rates and the value of the dollar, to which much of Brazil's local-currency debt is linked. Since the final weeks of the election campaign, Lula has worked hard to turn investor panic into mere wariness. Some of his ideas are likely to come from Marcos Lisboa, the economic-policy secretary and co-author of "Lost Agenda", a recent paper that advocated microeconomic reforms, such as trimming the role of Brazil's overgrown labour courts. The new government seems likely to adopt a pragmatic stance on trade policy, despite the PT's traditional support for protectionism. Brazil's prospects turn on whether Lula can turn these pragmatic intentions into policy achievements.

Reports on the reaction of financial markets to the rescue of Brazil by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as of August 2002. Details of the IMF package, its aim to prevent speculative attacks against the real, and to finance deficits for this year and next; Topics of default on debt and the downgrading of Brazil by Moody's credit-rating agency; Discussion of a paper on Brazil's debt sustainability by John Williamson of the Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C.; Outlook for further financial crisis in Brazil.

The article discusses how the countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRICS) have helped poorer nations emerge from the global recession. According to the article, the study "Global Financial Crisis Discussion Paper Synthesis (phase 2)" by Dirk Willem te Velde from the Overseas Development Institute found that emerging powers affect the growth prospects of poorer ones. How the BRICS' deals have affected trade and foreign direct investment from the West to Africa are discussed.

The article looks at how Brazil issued its first international bond. Emerging markets are tainted in investors' eyes by "original sin": they must borrow from rich foreigners in the foreigners' currencies. When investors worry, those currencies jump, increasing the borrowers' burden, sometimes through no fault of their own. Brazil, the world's biggest emerging-market debtor, knows all about original sin, having endured a series of painful devaluations over the decades. On September 19th it gained something akin to absolution, by issuing its first international bond in its own currency, the real. Brazil is not the pioneer. Uruguay issued an international peso bond in 2003 and Colombia followed last year. Other countries, such as Mexico, make it easy for foreign investors to buy domestic bonds. Brazil has a giant domestic debt market, where interest rates are among the world's highest, but makes it hard for foreigners to invest. The new bond pays real interest rates without the red tape, and investors queued up. Until now, only investors willing to open accounts and pay taxes in Brazil, mainly locals along with foreign banks and hedge funds, have been able to buy real paper yielding close to 20%.