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The Covid-19 pandemic had different impacts across the globe, according to both country structure and conjunctural responses from local governments. This article aims to characterize the main traits of capitalism in Brazil, with a focus on its evolution over the last 20 years and the way these characteristics shaped both the impacts of the pandemic and the responses to the so-called "Corona-crisis". The hypothesis is that the socioeconomic impacts of any world crisis tend to be higher in peripheral countries, but the government reactions to such crises are important in determining the socioeconomic dynamics that evolve. The analysis is attentive to the interactions between aspects which are inherent to the capitalist system, aspects related to the Brazilian colonial history and the resulting insertion of Brazil in the global economy, and aspects related to the Brazilian current context - in particular the socioeconomic and political crises since 2014, the coup d'état against President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the outbreak of the pandemic in a country governed from 2018 to 2022 by a far-right government. The main conclusions are that the pandemic provoked no major changes, but rather accelerated ongoing movements and deepened some old traits of the Brazilian economy, especially its vulnerability, its structural heterogeneities, the precariousness of the labor market and social inequalities.

The main goal of the paper is to extract the aggregate demand and aggregate supply shocks in Greece, Ireland, Italy and Portugal, as well as to examine the correlation among the two types of shocks. The decomposition of the shocks was achieved by using a structural vector autoregression that analyses the relationship between the evolution of the gross domestic product and inflation in the period 1997-2015. The goal of the paper is to confirm the aggregate demand - aggregate supply model in the above-mentioned economies., 18 pages

The experiences of 259 regions in 21 European countries with within country GDP per capita and labour productivity growth suggest that variables associated with pro-active, growth oriented strategies are consistently more important predictors of successful regional development than variables related to austerity for a range of measures of successful development. Since regions are the only historical examples of restructuring in currency unions, we therefore also argue for a more growth oriented strategy to solve the problems of the European periphery and outline some features of such a strategy.

The experiences of 259 regions in 21 European countries with within country GDP per capita and labour productivity growth suggest that variables associated with pro-active, growth oriented strategies are consistently more important predictors of successful regional development than variables related to austerity for a range of measures of successful development. Since regions are the only historical examples of restructuring in currency unions, we therefore also argue for a more growth oriented strategy to solve the problems of the European periphery and outline some features of such a strategy.