Search

The number of Covid-19 cases is increasing dramatically worldwide, with several countries experiencing a second and worse wave. Therefore, the availability of reliable forecasts for the number of cases and deaths in the coming days is of fundamental importance. We propose a simple statistical method for short-term real-time forecasting of the number of Covid-19 cases and fatalities in countries that are latecomers – i.e., countries where cases of the disease started to appear some time after others. In particular, we propose a penalized (LASSO) regression with an error correction mechanism to construct a model of a latecomer in terms of the other countries that were at a similar stage of the pandemic some days before. By tracking the number of cases in those countries, we forecast through an adaptive rolling-window scheme the number of cases and deaths in the latecomer. We apply this methodology to four different countries: Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Portugal. We show that the methodology performs very well. These forecasts aim to foster a better short-run management of the health system capacity and can be applied not only to countries but to different regions within a country, as well.

This paper examines the effects of campaign spending limits on political competition and incumbency advantage. We study a reform in Brazil that imposed limits on campaign spending for mayoral elections. These limits were implemented with a discontinuous kink which we exploit for causal identification. We find that stricter limits increase political competition by creating a larger pool of candidates that is on average less wealthy. Moreover, we find that stricter spending limits reduce the incumbency advantage, causing mayors to be less likely to be reelected. These findings are consistent with a contest model with spending caps and endogenous candidate entry.

Political corruption is considered a major impediment to economic development, and yet it remains pervasive throughout the world. This paper examines the extent to which government audits of public resources can reduce corruption by enhancing political and judiciary accountability. We do so in the context of Brazil’s anti-corruption program, which randomly audits municipalities for their use of federal funds. We find that being audited in the past reduces future corruption by 8 percent, while also increasing the likelihood of experiencing a subsequent legal action by 20 percent. We interpret these reduced-form findings through a political agency model, which we structurally estimate. Based on our estimated model, the reduction in corruption comes mostly from the audits increasing the perceived threat of the non-electoral costs of engaging in corruption.

We report two results. First, we evaluate the impact of a nationwide anti-firearm legislation passedby the Brazilian Congress in December 2003 (Estatuto do Desarmamento, henceforth ED). Our identificationstrategy hinges on the hypothesis that the law had stronger impact in places where gun prevalence washigher in the baseline. We find evidence that homicides (reduced form) and firearms prevalence(mechanism or first-stage) dropped faster in places with higher gun prevalence after the 2003. Using ourpreferred estimates, the ED saved between 2,000 and 2,750 lives from 2004 through 2007 in cities withmore than 50,000 inhabitants in the state of São Paulo. Second, assuming the ED causes homicide onlythrough its impact on firearms prevalence, we recover a causal estimate of the impact of firearms onhomicides. One standard deviation in the prevalence of firearms reduces homicides by quarter of astandard deviation. We find no impact of both ED and firearms on property crime in general or onrobberies.

We analyze the impact of the controls and restrictions on capital inflows that Brazil has adopted since late 2009. We document that these measures had some success in segmenting the Brazilian and global financial markets, as measured by wedges between onshore and offshore prices of similar fixed and variable income assets. However, that failed to translate into significant changes in the exchange rate, at least in the immediate aftermath of these measures, suggesting limited success in mitigating real appreciation. But capital controls/restrictions may have contributed to the sizable depreciation of the real in 2012, possibly amplifying the effect on the exchange rate of cuts in the interest policy rate during that period.

This paper investigates the impact of Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs on crime. Making use of a unique dataset combining detailed school characteristics with time and geo-referenced crime information from the city of São Paulo, Brazil, we estimate the contemporaneous effect of the Bolsa Família program on crime. We address the endogeneity of CCT coverage by exploiting the 2008 expansion of the program to adolescents aged 16 and 17. We construct an instrument that combines the timing of expansion and the initial demographic composition of schools to identify plausibly exogenous variations in the number of children covered by Bolsa Família. We find a robust and significant negative impact of Bolsa Família coverage on crime. The evidence suggests that the main effect works through increased household income or changed peer group, rather than from incapacitation from time spent in school

Tendo em vista o padrão de comércio da economia brasileira, o aumento paulatino daparticipação de bens importados na oferta de produtos industriais no País é simples einexorável decorrência lógica do processo de abertura. Mas a resistência política a esseaumento de participação das importações vem sendo exacerbada pela perda decompetitividade da indústria de transformação que, só muito recentemente, deixou deser associada exclusivamente ao câmbio.Passou agora a ser percebido com mais clareza que o aumento persistente do CustoBrasil – decorrente, em boa parte, da elevação sem fim da carga tributária e dasdeficiências dos três níveis de governo no desempenho das funções que lhes cabem –vem tendo papel crucial na perda de competitividade. E certamente foi um grandeavanço que, afinal, o governo tenha entendido que algum esforço de desoneração fiscalse tornara imprescindível. O que é lamentável é que as medidas de desoneração parafazer face à perda de competitividade da indústria tenham sido tão mal concebidas.Sem condições de conciliar seu projeto político com um programa de reduçãohorizontal, efetiva e substancial da carga tributária, o governo vem manipulando umapolítica espalhafatosa e pouco transparente de desoneração da folha que, em meio amuita poeira, pouco desonera. Em vez de simples redução da alíquota de contribuiçãopatronal, o que vem sendo oferecido é uma injustificável mudança de base fiscal. Contribuição paga sobre faturamento e não mais sobre a folha de pagamento, comalguma desoneração embutida na troca, e alíquotas fixadas setor a setor, na medida daestridência do protesto de cada um. Arranjo peculiar e primitivo que pode transformaro sistema tributário nacional numa colcha de retalhos ainda mais caótica do que já é.

This paper estimates the health dimension of the welfare cost of homicides in Brazil incorporating age, gender, educational, and regional heterogeneities. We use the marginal willingness to pay approach from the “value of life” literature to assign monetary values to the welfare cost of increased mortality due to violence. The results indicate that the present discounted value of the welfare cost of homicides in Brazil corresponds to roughly 78% of the GDP or, measured in terms of yearly flow, 2.3%. The analysis also indicates that reliance on aggregate data to perform such calculations, without taking into account the relevant dimensions of heterogeneity, can lead to biases of the order of 20% in the estimated social cost of violence

Since the conquest of hyperinflation, with the Real Plan, in 1994, the Brazilian financial system has grown from early infancy to late adolescence. We describe the process of maturing with emphasis on the defining features of the Brazilian financial system over the last 20 years: 1) stabilization and the subsequent financial crisis; 2) universality of banks; 3) market segmentation through public lending; 4) institutional improvement. Further paraphrasing Díaz Alejandro (1984), we raise some hypotheses on why, this time, the financial boom has not (at least yet) turned into a financial crash.

Agents operating in illegal markets cannot resort to the justice system to guarantee property rights, to enforce contracts, or to seek protection from competitors’ improper behaviors. In these contexts, violence is used to enforce previous agreements and to fight for market share. This relationship plays a major role in the debate on the pernicious effects of the illegality of drug trade. This paper explores a singular episode of transition of a market from legal to illegal to provide a first piece of evidence on the causal effect of illegality on systemic violence. Brazil has historically been the main world producer of big leaf mahogany (a tropical wood). Starting in the 1990s, policies restricting extraction and trade of mahogany, culminating with prohibition, were implemented. First, we present evidence that large scale mahogany trade persisted after prohibition, through misclassification of mahogany exports as “other tropical timber species.” Second, we document relative increases in violence after prohibition in areas with: (i) higher share of mahogany exports before prohibition; (ii) higher suspected illegal mahogany activity after prohibition; and (iii) natural occurrence of mahogany. We believe this is one of the first documented experiences of increase in violence following the transition of a market from legal to illegal.

We use two frameworks to analyze the recent Brazilian public debt management. The first one encompasses the Brazilian optimal public debt management analysis through the examination of the correlations among the main variables to which the public debt is indexed. The second seeks to address the consequences of recent Brazilian economic policies, such as international reserves accumulation through sterilized interventions by the Central Bank and excessive capitalization of federal financial institutions. Those policies have important, albeit often ignored, fiscal impacts, which became important to determine the current size, maturity and composition of the public debt stock.

Unlike common wisdom, sterilized FX purchases under inflation targeting, i.e., those that keep the interest rate at the level targeted by the central bank, generally increase aggregate demand. We resort to a simple model with a credit channel to argue that FX purchases, by funding bank credit, end up increasing aggregate and money demand, while expanding loans and reducing the loan interest rate. Therefore, restoring the interest rate to the level previous to the FX purchase may not be sufficient to avoid the expansionary effect; the new money market equilibrium, at the same interest rate, will entail a larger money supply, higher output and larger money demand. Recent Brazilian evidence is reviewed, showing that this effect may be empirically relevant. If this is the case, inflation targeters may have another reason to be concerned when conducting FX sterilized interventions, besides their high cost and controversial effectiveness in preventing nominal appreciation. FX sterilized purchases may not only fail to prevent nominal appreciation, but also boost activity and inflation, thereby appreciating the real exchange rate.

Few developing countries have adopted an Unemployment Insurance (UI) program but the list of countries considering its implementation is growing. Focusing on the Brazilian UI program and using administrative data covering the universe of formal employment, we provide empirical evidence documenting two relevant facts for the debate around the design of such program in countries characterized by a large informal sector and a lack of administrative and enforcement capacity. First, UI benefits strongly affects the timing of formal job finding for those workers able to find a formal job soon after job-loss. Second, those workers constitute a small share of the overall pool of UI beneficiaries, since most job-losers do not find a formal job rapidly. Therefore, offering UI is costly (most beneficiaries would exhaust their benefits for typical lengths of benefit duration) and UI benefits have little distortionary effect on the job-finding behavior of the average (formal) job-loser: they constitute pure income transfers for 3/4 of the potential beneficiaries. We further discuss implications of these 2 facts and highlight some interactions with job protection legislations (hiring costs), the main policy instrument used to protect workers from labor demand fluctuations in those countries.

Este capítulo abarca um longo período entre marcado por três golpes de estado. O primeiro golpe, em 1930, determinou o fim da República Velha e o início de um período de quinze anos de preeminência política de Getúlio Vargas, primeiro como chefe do Governo Provisório, depois como presidente eleito indiretamente de acordo com as regras da Constituição de 1934 e, finalmente, a partir de novembro de 1937, como ditador, à frente do Estado Novo. Em 1945, em outro golpe, Vargas foi deposto, tendo início a “Terceira República”. O terceiro golpe, em 1964, marcou o início da ditadura militar que sobreviveria até meados da década de 1980.

In 2004, in the beginning of the first president Lula mandate, a complete regulatory reform of electricity was launched. In 2008, four years after, Brazilian Congress started an investigation of the causes of Brazilian relatively high electricity tariffs. The results of the investigation pointed out numerous reasons, but failed to identify generation costs as one of the main causes. In this paper the analysis done by Congress is broadened addressing the trend in electricity production costs. The main conclusions are that the implementation of auctions together with subsidies from state enterprises did not reduce future acquisition costs as much as expected, but successfully reduced the rhythm of price increases. The long run marginal expansion cost is increasing very fast because new hydro plants are ever more distant of consumption centers and environmental costs are difficult to mitigate. Thermal plants and other technologies, though increasing in importance, still have much higher prices. In case prices reflected marginal incremental costs, electricity prices would have been much higher. The fact that consumers do not see such high incremental costs, allow them to take wrong consumption decisions. As consumers are able to buy at prices lower than marginal cost, consumption levels go too far. Demand increases amplify the electricity market gap and reinforce the necessity of new investments.

Whether campaign advertising influences election outcomes is an open question; a paradox given the amount spent on campaigning in general and TV advertising in particular. We argue that such “absence of documentation” is due to the focus of the empirical literature on the United States, in which the allocation of campaign spending and advertising is decentralized. We explore a quasinatural experiment that enables us to mitigate the omitted variables and reverse causality problems caused by decentralized allocation. In Brazil, gubernatorial elections work in a two-round system. In the first round, candidates’ TV time shares are determined by their coalitions’ share of seats in the National Parliament. In the second round, TV time is split equally between the first-round winner and runner-up. Using differences between rounds as a source of variation, we find a large causal effect of TV advertising on election outcomes.

This paper surveys the formation and development of insurance business in Brazil. It describes its very first steps, from the colonial times and imperial era to recent events. Particular attention is given to regulatory changes, showing how they evolved in response to macroeconomic shocks that affected the Brazilian economy during this period.

In 2004, Brazil provided an interesting natural experiment concerning personal credit. A new law was enacted allowing banks to offer loans with repayment through automatic payroll or social security benefit deduction, thus removing a significant part of the moral hazard problem by eliminating the choice of default when debtors are able to pay their loans out of their wages. We estimate the impact of the new law using car loans as a control group. We find that, at the industry level, the new law has caused a reduction in interest rates and an increase in the volume of personal credit.

Entre o final de janeiro de 1961 e 31 de março de 1964, o Brasil viveu um período de singular turbulência política, assistiu a única experiência parlamentarista da era republicana, teve três presidentes, cinco chefes de governo e seis ministros da Fazenda. A rotação no comando da política econômica contribuiu para a perda progressiva do controle sobre a inflação e outras variáveis macroeconômicas. Nesse contexto, a subdivisão do capítulo segue a seqüência de desenvolvimentos políticos que marcou o período: a breve tentativa de estabilização ortodoxa sob Quadros, as políticas econômicas do período parlamentarista, e a fase presidencialista do governo Goulart, marcada pela implementação tentativa do Plano Trienal. A última seção inclui uma discussão sobre as origens da desaceleração de 1963-1964 bem como uma avaliação mais ampla das políticas do período em questão.

Mimicking the US in 1980 and 1990s, Brazil is a remarkable case of a major shift in homicides. After increasing steadily throughout the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, homicides reached a peak in 2003, and then fell. I show a strong time-series co-movement between homicide rates and the percentage of the population in 15-24 age bracket. Using a panel of states, I find a very high elasticity of homicide with respect to changes in the 15-24 year-old population (2.4), after controlling for income, income inequality, and state and year fixed effects. I then focus on the case of São Paulo, the largest state in the country, and whose shift in homicides has been particularly acute. City-level panel elasticities are similar to the state-level estimates. Furthermore, the demographic shift in São Paulo was more pronounced than the national one, explaining the particularly large shift in homicides in São Paulo. The large cohort born from the mid 1970 through the early 1980 is the result of a sharp reduction in infant mortality only belatedly followed by acceleration in the reduction of fertility. In line with the Easterlin Hypothesis (Easterlin [1980]), this large cohort faced tough economic conditions. Educational attainment ceased to improve for this cohort, and unemployment rates upon entering the job market were exceptionally high. Thus, the large homicide shift in Brazil is produced by a particularly large and socially fragile cohort.

No Brasil, o efeito mais grave da recente crise econômica mundial adveio da onda de afrouxamento generalizado de restrições orçamentárias que teve origem nas economias avançadas. A crise deu ao governo pretexto para mudanças substanciais no regime fiscal e nas relações entre o Estado e a economia. A metade final do segundo mandato do Presidente Lula tem sido marcada por clara deterioração de contas públicas, com expansão mais acelerada de gastos primários e compromisso cada vez mais frouxo com o cumprimento estrito de metas fiscais. Revelando preferência inequívoca por soluções de project financing intensivas em recursos públicos, o governo tem recorrido à emissão de dívida pelo Tesouro para promover rápida expansão do crédito estatal subsidiado. As mudanças vêm implicando reversões de avanços institucionais importantes que chegaram a parecer definitivos, como a absoluta separação entre as contas do setor público não-financeiro e das instituições financeiras federais. O artigo analisa a extensão dessa multifacetada deterioração do regime fiscal e seus possíveis desdobramentos

This paper explores the experience of information sharing, coordination, and integration of actions of the Civil and Military Polices in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, in the context of the IGESP program. The IGESP is based on the introduction of information management systems and organizational changes akin to those associated with COMPSTAT. All the evidence presented points to a causal effect of the IGESP on crime. The most conservative estimates indicate a reduction of 24% in property crimes and 13% in personal crimes. There is also evidence that the IGESP is associated with improved police response, measured by apprehension of weapons and clearance rates. We present one of the first set of causal estimates – with a clear identification strategy – of the impact of COMPSTAT-like programs. The results suggest that the coordination and informational gains represented by the program may constitute a first-order factor in a successful policy for fighting crime.

Este capítulo sobre a economia imperial é de caráter introdutório e está dividido em dez seções, além desta introdução. O objetivo é colocar em perspectiva as análises mais detalhadas referentes à política econômica durante o período republicano que compõem os demais capítulos deste livro. As duas seções iniciais tratam de aspectos demográficos e do ritmo de crescimento durante o período imperial. A seção 3 considera as principais culturas agrícolas, sua evolução no tempo e distribuição regional, além de fazer referência aos outros setores de menor importância como indústria e mineração. As três seções seguintes abordam os fatores de produção relevantes na expansão da cultura cafeeira no Brasil imperial: trabalho, terra e capital. Nas seções 7, 8 e 9 são consideradas questões relacionadas ao comércio exterior, aos diferentes regimes monetários e às finanças públicas. A seção 10 conclui.

This paper analyzes the determinants of local institutions and distribution of political power within a constant ‘macro-institutional’ setting. We show that characteristics of Brazilian municipalities related to institutional quality and distribution of political power are partly inherited from the colonial histories experienced by different areas of the country. Municipalities with origins tracing back to the sugar-cane colonial cycle – characterized by a polarized and oligarchic socioeconomic structure – display today more inequality in the distribution of endowments (land). Municipalities with origins tracing back to the gold colonial cycle – characterized by a heavily inefficient presence of the Portuguese state – display today worse governance practices and less access to justice. The colonial rent-seeking episodes are also correlated with lower provision of public goods and lower income per capita.

We study the determinants of the public-private earnings gap for different levels of schooling of Brazilian workers. First, using the current earnings as the variable of interest, we estimate that less educated people receive higher earnings in the public sector (i.e., the earnings gap is favorable to the public sector). On the other hand, for workers with higher schooling, the earnings gap disappears or becomes favorable to the private sector. In addition, we consider the different retirement regimes in Brazil by creating the variable Present Value of Work Contract (PVWC). This variable is a measure of the lifetime earnings for each individual in our database. In contrast to the results from the current earnings analysis, we found that the PVWC gap is favorable to the public sector even for the highest educated group of workers.

Tax reform has been a central issue of the Brazilian economic debate for at least a decade. But despite the supposedly reformist resolution of several governments, very little was in fact achieved. The idea of reforming the country’s indirect taxation system is, once again, in the forefront of the government’s agenda. The complexity of Brazil’s fiscal federalism has been often and rightly mentioned as a major difficulty to the advancement of the tax reform. This paper tries to look beyond fiscal federalism and focus on difficulties of a different kind, that have to do with the sheer magnitude of the reform and the uneven sectoral distribution of the indirect-tax burden in the country. After an initial section providing a brief historical and institutional background, section B discusses the various tax-reform attempts that took place since 1997, and draws useful insights for the analysis of the political economy of the taxreform deadlock. Sections C and D look into indirect taxation in Brazil, calling attention to challenges entailed by the scale of the intended reform and the uneven sectoral distribution of the tax burden. The political economy of the involved difficulties is discussed in section E. Concluding remarks are presented in section F.

In third generation currency crises models, balance sheet losses from currency depreciations propagate the crises into the real sector of the economy. To test these models, we built a firmlevel database that allowed us to measure currency mismatches around the 2002 Brazilian currency crisis. We found that between 2001 and 2003, firms with large currency mismatches just before the crisis reduced their investment rates 8.1 percentage points more than other publicly held firms. We also showed that the currency depreciation increased exporters revenue, but those with currency mismatches reduced investments 12.5 percentage points more than other exporters. These estimated reductions in investment are economically very significant, underscoring the importance of negative balance sheet effects in currency crises. Jel Codes:F32; F34; G31; G32

Como em várias outras atividades, a pesquisa em Economia internaliza um conflito entre qualidade e quantidade. Para avaliar tal conflito, este artigo documenta os trabalhos publicados entre 1999 e 2004 por 94 pesquisadores do CNPq e 1.209 pesquisadores de 54 centros americanos de referência em Economia. Os dados mostram que a média de publicações internacionais dos pesquisadores do CNPq é extremamente pequena, quando comparada com a de seus pares americanos com mesma orientação metodológica. Ainda assim, o número médio total das publicações dos pesquisadores no Brasil é estatisticamente maior, sugerindo um sacrifício de qualidade para aumentar o número de publicações.

We measure the competitive effect of public ownership of banks in concentrated local banking markets in Brazil by extending Bresnahan and Reiss’s [1991] framework to measure the effects of entry in concentrated markets. We use variation in market size, the number of competitors and their identity to infer how conduct is affected by the entry of a private vis-à-vis a public bank. We find that, while local markets whose structure is private bank duopoly are 100% larger than private monopolies, duopolies with one public and one private bank and private monopolies are no different with respect to market size. These results suggest that, while the presence of private banks toughens competition, public banks do not affect conduct.

We study the impacts of family income and parental education on the probability of children’s schooling delay using the 1996 PNAD. With the adoption of some hypotheses about the links between generations of children, parents and grandparents, we control for the existence of non observable factors that simultaneously affect the income formation of parents and decisions concerning children schooling (simultaneity bias) or that are transmitted from one generation to another (hereditary bias). We work with three instruments: number of schools by the time parents were children; family factor changes across generations (parents/grandparents); and the 1971 change of the educational system.

This paper aims to estimate the effects of maternity leave legislation in women’s wages and employment in Brazil. We analyze the impact of an increase in the leave period, which was raised from 12 weeks to 120 days, as prescribed by the Federal Constitution of 1998. According to the theoretical literature, the effect of the legislation is ambiguous. One should expect that the leave would have negative effects on labor demand to the extent that it raises labor costs. On the other hand, the legislation is expected to increase labor supply and can have positive effects on wages if it avoids that women leave the labor market each time they have a child, therefore increasing the firm-specific human capital of these workers. We use a simple difference-indifferences methodology applied to data from Pesquisa Mensal de Emprego between 1986 and 1991. We compare the changes in wages and employment between the periods before and after the 1988 Constitution of women in fertile ages (our treatment group) with those of two control groups: men at the same ages and women in non-fertile ages. The results show that the leave increase had no significant impact on wages. We also find no signs that the leave increase raised women’s retention in the labor market, even in the case of the more educated female workers. The results also show insignificant impact in women’s employment.

We analyze the Brazilian experience in the 1990s to access the effectiveness of controls on capital inflows in restricting financial inflows and changing their composition towards long term flows. Econometric exercises (VARs) lead us to conclude that controls on capital inflows were effective in deterring financial inflows for only a brief period, from two to six months. The hypothesis to explain the ineffectiveness of the controls is that financial institutions performed several operations aimed at avoiding capital controls. We then conducted interviews with market players in order to provide several examples of the financial strategies that were used in this period to invest in the Brazilian fixed income market while bypassing capital controls. The main conclusion is that controls on capital inflows, while they may be desirable, are of very limited effectiveness under sophisticated financial markets. Therefore, policy-makers should avoid spending the scarce resources of bank supervision trying to implement them and focus more in improving economic policy.

More than eleven years after the end of hyperinflation in Brazil, domestic bond markets have been unable to lengthen the average maturity of both public and private bonds. This paper shows that the lengthening is theoretically and practically (we analyzed the experiences of Israel, Mexico and Poland), a consequence of persistent stabilization programs that successfully reduced systemic risk. Therefore, it is pointless to try to achieve the lengthening as an objective in isolation. It is necessary to improve the economic fundamentals that maintain a high level of systemic risk. Only in this context, measures that aim at lengthening bonds’ maturity will indeed produce positive results.

The goal of this paper is twofold. First, using five of the most actively traded stocks in the Brazilian financial market, this paper shows that the normality assumption commonly used in the risk management area to describe the distributions of returns standardized by volatilities is not compatible with volatilities estimated by EWMA or GARCH models. In sharp contrast, when the information contained in high frequency data is used to construct the realized volatility measures, we attain the normality of the standardized returns, giving promise of improvements in Value-at-Risk statistics. We also describe the distributions of volatilities of the Brazilian stocks, showing that they are nearly lognormal. Second, we estimate a simple model to the log of realized volatilities that differs from the ones in other studies. The main difference is that we do not find evidence of long memory. The estimated model is compared with commonly used alternatives in an out-of-sample forecasting experiment.

This paper examines the effect of nonagricultural land use on agrarian organization and land reform, providing a simple model to determine its policy implications and some evidence on its importance. It is argued that, if land-rental market is imperfect, there is a role for redistributive land policies and the following implications hold: (i) land reform is more probable to enhance efficiency in a low-wage economy; (ii) such policies should aim small farmers instead of landless people, obtaining land from large landholders. Empirical evidence suggests this is a relevant issue in Brazil, specially during periods of high macroeconomic instability.

Skilled labor earnings differentials decreased during the trade liberalization implemented in Brazil from 1988 to 1995. This paper investigates the role of trade liberalization in explaining these relative earnings movements. We perform several independent empirical exercises that check the traditional trade transmission mechanism, using disaggregated data on tariffs, prices, earnings, employment and skill intensity. We find that: i) employment shifted from skilled to unskilled intensive sectors, and each sector increased its relative share of skilled labor; ii) relative prices fell in skill intensive sectors; iii) tari¤ changes across sectors were not related to skill intensities, but the pass-through from tariffs to prices was larger in skill intensive sectors; iv) the decline in skilled earnings differentials mandated by the price variation predicted by trade was even larger than the observed one. The results are compatible with trade liberalization accounting for the observed relative earnings changes in Brazil. They also highlight the importance of considering the effects of differentiated pass-through from tariffs to prices.

With an overindebted public-sector, Brazil has been on the brink of a fiscal dominance problem for quite a long time. The term has been usually associated to a situation in which monetary policy becomes subordinated to fiscal needs. This paper calls attention to broader implications of prolonged exposure to impending fiscal dominance. A highdebt environment may make perfectly reasonable fiscal-reform initiatives seem extremely risky. Without any room to absorb revenue losses, in a complex fiscalfederalism arrangement, the government is bound to recurrently see badly needed tax reform, which could lead to a much less distorting tax system, as an unaffordable adventure. The paper is structured in the following way. The next section presents stylized facts that have been underlying a whole decade of unsuccessful tax-reform attempts in Brazil. Section 3 shows how the combination of those facts creates very unfavorable conditions for the approval of the kind of tax reform the country needs. A simple political economy model is developed in section 4. Simulations based on the model are analyzed in sections 5 and 6. Concluding remarks are presented in the last section.

With the external accounts problems reasonably solved, Brazil’s economic policy agenda is bound to be increasingly focused on fiscal issues. What makes the design of economic policy especially complex in this area is the fact that there are several superimposed and potentially conflicting fiscal agendas. The main challenge of the country’s economic policy over the coming years will be to successfully conciliate the multiple fiscal agendas that will have to be faced, in order to remodel and to resize the extraction and allocation of fiscal resources that already amount to 40 percent of GDP. The scope for economic growth and construction of a more equitable society will largely depend upon the degree of success the country’s political system will be able to show in its response to this challenge.

This paper is divided in nine sections. A short introduction puts the subject matter in perspective in the context of the FTAA negotiations. Section 1 deals with obstacles to a successful conclusion of the FTAA both in Mercosur - especially in Brazil. The following section considers briefly how notions about reciprocity and balance of concessions have been applied in multilateral negotiations and how they may be adjusted in the case of negotiations involving free trade areas. The following two triads of sections refer to the United States (sections 3, 4 and 5) and Brazil (sections 6, 7 and 8). Sections 3 and 6 analyze in both economies how protectionist interests are distributed from the point of view of sectors affected and of their location (states and, for the United States, congressional districts). The relative importance of export interests by state is gauged in sections 4 and 7. The relative net balance of protectionist and export interests is evaluated in sections 5 and 8 under different assumptions in an effort to cope with the limitations of the measures used. Section 9 concludes.

The paper focuses on market power by certain countries in specific commodity markets as a crucial factor in explaining the level of protection. It is argued that a country which is a price maker in the world market of a specific commodity might affect its world price through export taxes, import taxes and commodity stockpiling. Standard reduced form equations were estimated to test if significant market shares in international markets of Brazilian coffee, Chilean saltpetre and US cotton implied domestic variables were relevant for the determination of the corresponding world commodity prices. Results suggest the producers succeeded in passing through increases in internal costs to the relevant world commodity price.

The real impact of taxes on the economy can only be assessed when we consider the behavioral responses of economic agents due to these taxes. This paper shows how income taxation in Brazil gives incentives to some classes of taxpayers to incorporate in order to reduce their tax burden. Microdata analysis on these taxpayers characteristics indicate that the probability of incorporation is strongly related to tax rule

We thoroughly describe the workings of the Brazilian interbank exchange rate market: agents, products, regulation, operation and risks. We analyse the recent evolution of the exchange rate market and came to a negative evaluation of the current exchange rate trading system, thereby suggesting an alternative centralized system, more liquid and transparent. We show econometrically that the exchange rate is firstly formed in the exchange rate futures market at the Commodities and Futures Exchange (BM&F), being then transmitted through arbitrage to the spot market.

This paper on the Brazilian Economy is the draft of a chapter to be included in volume IX of the Cambridge History of Latin America, edited by Leslie Bethell . The 1929-1980 period has been covered by the material circulated in Texto para Discussão 0433, November 2000. A third chapter on the period after 1994 will conclude the sequence.

This paper focuses on the impact of China’s emergence on Brazil trade and investment flows and also on the policies and initiatives taken by the Brazilian public and private sectors seeking to meet the challenge raised by it. Based on this evidence alternative scenarios of future developments concerning China and its impact on Brazil will be outlined and Brazilian policies considered. The paper is divided into four sections. The first section describes the effects of China’s expanded role in the world economy on trade and investment flows from a Brazilian perspective. Section 2 examines the complementarity between trade and outward investment flows for Brazil and China. Diversion of foreign direct investment from Brazil to China is briefly considered. The third section focuses on Brazilian policies and China.The conclusive section centers on future developments concerning the Chinese economy and how they may effect Brazil and considers policy suggestions to complement what has already been done to face the challenges and exploit opportunities raised by China’s increasing role in the world economy.