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Based on 14 months of ethnographic research, this paper analyzes soil management within the plantation model of farmingin order to understand the extent to which life on large-scale monocultural farms can be controlled and directed toward extractiveproduction. Transnational soy farmers in Western Bahia Brazil 'correct' soils in the region to make them productive and marshal thisagronomic work to claim that they have added value to the land by 'building it up'. Still, the permeability of the plantation keepstransnational farmers from achieving their dreams of control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically examines the impact of academic research on high-tech manufacturing growth of 28 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and emerging countries over the 1991-2005 period. A standard research and development (R&D) expenditure based measure is found to be too general to capture the input in high-tech research. To overcome this problem, a novel proxy for high-tech research investment--the supercomputer capacity--is proposed. Empirical evidence strongly supports this choice of variable. It is also found that academic R&D exerts a larger growth effect on high-tech output than its industry and government counterparts, but only the impact differential between academic and government R&D is statistically significant.

In 2009, a think tank called the International Alliance of Leading Education Institutes (IALEI) announced the results of a study entitled Climate Change and Sustainable Development: The Response from Education. Intended for a policy audience, the study offered a glimpse into the status of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and an early look at the emergence of Climate Change Education (CCE), in 10 different nations. As with most international reports, the IALEI report provoked many questions, some of which are more broadly relevant to scholarship and practice. This paper introduces a review symposium that addresses three such questions: (1) How coherent is the concept of ESD across national contexts and what conceptual tensions continue to surround ESD and CCE? (2) Can nation-level analyses tell us anything useful about countries where education is not centrally governed? and (3) In light of the evolving relationship between educational research and policy, how should researchers engage with ongoing policy debates? (Contains 4 notes.)

In his 2008 bestseller, "The Post-American World," Fareed Zakaria argued that the most significant development of the early 21st century is not, as others have predicted, the inevitable decline of the United States as the world's super-power but rather "the rise of the rest." In subsequent works, Zakaria and many others, including leading economists and statisticians, have focused on those countries that best exemplify the gradual unfolding of a multi-polar world. Economists are especially interested in "emerging markets," mostly countries with large populations where consumption of all kinds of goods is on the rise and where legal frameworks and cooperative governments provide incentives or at least protection for investors. Major emerging-market countries such as China, Brazil, and Nigeria differ greatly from one another, of course, but they also share important characteristics. One of these is the emphasis on improving access to education for their citizens. With regard to postsecondary education, almost without exception leaders of those countries profess their commitment to enhance both capacity and quality. This belief is so widely held and so often articulated that sometimes it comes across as dogma. Across the globe, several trends are converging in ways that seem to open unprecedented opportunities for American colleges and universities to expand their influence and to increase their resources. And indeed, hundreds of American colleges and universities are recruiting foreign students, forming global or regional partnerships, and establishing programs and campuses abroad. This article examines these convergent trends. (Contains 17 resources.)

The paper reports from a comparative study on systems of quality assurance in 19 countries around the globe, and how these systems function as accountability mechanisms. Based on a theoretical framework for assessing how accountability mechanisms can contribute to build trust in the higher education sector, the analysis of the quality assurance systems underline the dominant role of quality assurance systems as the prime accountability mechanism in the sector, often accompanied by semi-autonomous agencies emphasising various forms of accreditation. Based on an assessment of the quality assurance systems it is still suggested that the current forms of accountability are not stimulating the up-building of trust in and of the sector. In the conclusion, some reflections are offered as alternatives to the current situation.

Recent energy and climate policies, particularly in the developed world, have increased demand for bioenergy as an alternative, which has led to both direct and indirect land-use changes and an array of environmental and socio-economic concerns. A comprehensive understanding of the land-use dynamics of bioenergy crop production is essential for the development of sustainable bioenergy and land-use policies. In this paper, we review the patterns and dynamics of land-use change associated with bioenergy crops (hereafter referred to as "bioenergy-driven land-use change"). The review focuses on four regions as the most prominent locations in which these patterns and changes occur: Brazil; Indonesia and Malaysia; the United States of America (U.S.A.); and the European Union (EU). The review confirms that bioenergy-driven land-use change has affected and will impact most severely on the "land- and resource-abundant" developing regions, such as Brazil, where economic development takes priority over sustainable land-use policies, and the enforcement capability is limited. Opportunities for more effective policy are available through the development of international climate change policy (e.g. REDD under the UNFCCC), and certification criteria for sustainable bioenergy products (e.g. EU RED). However, bioenergy produced from no and/or less land-using feedstocks (e.g. wastes and residues), and their associated technologies must be given higher priority to minimise bioenergy-driven land-use change and its negative impacts. (Contains 2 figures.)

In the context of open-access (OA) academic publishing, the mounting pressure cross global academe to publish or perish has spawned an exponentially growing number of dodgy academic e-journals charging high fees to authors, often US$300-650, and even triple that amount, promising super-fast processing and publication open-access (OA) online. Jeffrey Beall (Scholarly Open Access, http://scholarlyoa.com) has characterized this phenomenon as "predatory OA publishing," since it is oriented largely to extorting a high fee from authors. This exponential growth in start-up cyber-journals galore of questionable quality and dubious upstart origin is driven largely by the globalization of Euro-Atlantic research cultures into the Global South and lower-income economies everywhere, part of the now rapid internationalization of scientific research (Jha 2011) and "researching under the audit" (Illner 2011: 70), and is potentially a form of "academic racketeering." It tends to attract and exploit lesser-privileged academics, often on "knowledge production peripheries." They are a segment of a hugely expanding global constellation of researchers, in some ways a "research proletariat" (Harvie 2000), many of whom can can least afford the "cyber-services" of these start-up, fee-gouging OA journals. Yet researchers anywhere, including doctoral students and others in an "academic precariat," may be lured to publish there, given a turnaround time of three weeks from submission to acceptance and publication often offered and implemented (Stratford 2012). A certain kind of "market cynicism" (Power 2010) may take hold, where young academics are forced to think of themselves largely in economic terms and the "price" of quick dubious publication. In essential ways, the phenomenon of predatory academic journals is also part of the largely ex-colonial and subalternized "academic periphery striking back" against that Eurodominance of research cultures, involving basic contestations about asymmetrical power and representation and the geopolitics of hegemonic and subaltern knowledge production and dissemination on a global scale, the "coloniality of power/knowledge" (Quijano 2000; Grosvoguel 2008; Jaramillo 2012) within the changing face of biopolitical production and the emergence of a new "common" (Hardt 2010; Hardt & Negri 2009) inside globalized immaterial capitalist production. Racist subtexts about "academic scams based in Africa and South Asia" need to be confronted and avoided. In resisting trends toward corporate, high-cost Western-dominated academic publication, cost-free OA knowledge publication paradigms need to be expanded in the (re)appropriation of a "knowledge commons" under late capitalism. These include arXiv.org, journals like JCEPS, the Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Qualitative Social Research (bit.ly/xjc0mD), and more than 7,000 others associated with the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org) -- in the spirit of the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics (bit.ly/zPYYFJ) and the work of the Public Knowledge Project (http://pkp.sfu.ca), Open Journal Systems (tinyurl.com/2ydklr), SciELO (http://socialsciences.scielo.org/) in Latin America--and other initiatives for "Green OA" in open-access repositories elsewhere. These OA needs to be reconceived in the struggle for a "communism of the common" (Hardt 2010: 140). That re appropriation and its self-organization should become a main goal in confronting and dismantling the regime of monopolistic knowledge control today by giant "knowledge enclosure" corporations like Thomson-Reuters, Springer and Wiley. A key aim of the present paper is to spotlight these "predatory" journals and urge further empirical research. Despite the huge amount of largely bourgeois analysis of OA, there is very scant critical inquiry into such academic journals and their burgeoning conglomerates.

International travel has the potential to expand one's learning horizons exponentially, especially with the abundantly enriching experiences of adult, continuing, and lifelong learning conferences. CONFINTEA VI (The Sixth World International Conference in Adult Education) sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and organized by the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL) was held in Belem, Para, Brazil, December 1-4, 2009. UNESCO conducts an International Assembly on Adult Learning every 12 years. CONFINTEA V was held in Hamburg, Germany, July 14-18, 1997. All of the documents developed as background for Assemblies, and those produced by the Assemblies as the Official Documents, are available for viewing and printing: http://www.unesco.org/en/confinteavi/. In this article, the author reflects on UNESCO CONFINTEA VI.

The "Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior" was founded in 1958 by a group of male psychologists, mainly from the northeastern USA and connected with either Harvard or Columbia. Fifty years later about 20% of both editors and authors reside outside this country and almost the same proportion is women. Other changes in the journal include having its own website for more than a decade and now publishing online as well as on paper. A recent connection with PubMed Central of the National Library of Medicine has made possible the completely free electronic presentation of the entire archive of about 3,800 articles. (Contains 5 tables and 3 figures.)

This paper discusses the establishment of an international collaborative program focused on school improvement in Brazil and the United States. Two qualitative research studies were conducted on the development work conducted by faculty, students, and local K-12 school stakeholders. The design and implementation of collaborative student projects focused on multicultural education and the use of educational technologies. A model for international collaborative projects is presented that can serve as a framework for future projects following similar principles. (Contains 3 figures and 1 note.)

In the United States and around the rest of the world, there is a renewed focus on ensuring that schools are providing students with the skills necessary to compete in the global economy. High-quality summer learning programs are an ideal vehicle to help students gain content knowledge and develop innovative skills: they provide time for individual exploration and hands-on, experiential opportunities that can instill a lifelong love of learning that carries into the classroom and the workforce. This article provides an overview of the role and importance of education and out-of-school time in the global economy and of strategies employed by several countries to boost competitiveness, with a focus on the United States. The author discusses key skills necessary for success in the global economy and the ways in which high-quality summer learning programs can uniquely and successfully foster these skills. He argues that strategic investment in high-quality summer learning programs is necessary to help countries compete in the global economy. Despite decades of research on the need for and benefits of such programs, the summer months largely have been ignored by education policymakers, particularly in the United States, as a strategy to close the achievement gap and support youth development. (Contains 22 notes.)

Based on data from 700 companies in 20 countries, this paper records the research that investigates the contribution of organisational and technological practices to speed up New Product Development (NPD). The organisational practice is found positively correlated with the speed of NPD. However, no significant direct relationship was found between technology practice and the speed of NPD. The organisational and technological practices are found to be in balance, which may be a new input to explain how technology helps NPD. The implication is that organisational practices such as team, continuous improvement and Total Quality Management (TQM) philosophy are needed in order to implement technologies successfully. This result supports the simultaneous theory on innovation, which is especially important in developing countries. (Contains 1 figure and 4 tables.)

Many arguments in favour of school voucher programs are based upon libertarian free agency principles. Viewed at the organizational level, allowing persons to exercise choice in education would seem to offer incentives for all educational organizations within that framework to improve overall product quality and thus more effectively obtain the education good for both individual and society. However, analysis from the transcending institutional level shows that "supra"-organizational forces will progressively reduce choice and quality as both private and public organizations relinquish their distinctive curricula and philosophies as a "de facto" requirement for participation within the broader educational institution or "market". Acknowledging the costs of, and designing policy to maintain, particular information are both essential to effectively producing the education good within a competitive institutional structure. (Contains 1 note.)

Cultural understanding is essential to contemporary art education practice, however, there is much confusion about the various lenses through which one should consider the intersection between culture and education. Davenport (2000) distinguishes among four approaches to culture and education that include international-comparative, global, multicultural and community-based art education. This author's personal experience, which includes crossing geographical and cultural borders from Brazil to attend graduate school and developing a professional career in the United States, is marked by these overlapping and encompassing orientations toward education and culture. The author states that teachers and students should learn to investigate their own cultural traditions, belief systems, and values, as well as those of others, as a requirement for critical participation in the constantly changing world. While teaching, he seeks to create opportunities for cultural understanding by encouraging students to engage in qualitative field research. His goal is to prepare art educators to learn how to inquire about art and culture and investigate the dialectics of local and global influences within a particular context. Such research can inform meaningful art education practice that, while rooted in different communities, creates opportunities to recognize and transcent familiar boundaries. This article is a reflection of the author's attempts to incorporate these goals into a course entitled "Art in a Global Society." The main goal of the course is to prepare educators to examine border-crossing situations that facilitate contact with other cultures through art, education, or everyday experiences. As part of the course requirements, students design and conduct an independent research project based on the premise that direct communication can advance cultural understanding. The projects of two students are presented and discussed. (Contains 1 figure.)

Updating the 1920s notion of Anthropophagy developed to symbolize through cannibalistic ritual the process of cultural assimilation that influences art, this article examines issues of naming, describing, and representing contemporary Brazilian art. In the first part of the article, the work of four contemporary Brazilian artists recently exhibited in the United States frames criticism to the common practice of labeling contemporary artworks according to national identity. In the article's second section, Brazil's multifaceted cultural and artistic context will be used to outline implications for art education and institutional practices more attuned to the transnational dimensions of art. In conclusion, hybridity becomes a twofold framework. It describes, as Anthropophagy did before, cultural layering, negotiations, and disputes. It also articulates a political position more fitting to capture and interpret the art produced in our global age, not only in Brazil. (Contains 4 figures.)

Compares the histories of Brazilian and U.S. federal government policies toward educational governance. Argues that current policies that apparently support decentralization and privatization actually ensure the continued hegemony of the state while relieving it of financial and social responsibilities related to efficiency and equity. Contains 47 references. (SV)

Discusses decision making and politics in teacher education. In Papua New Guinea, poor command of the English language led to implementation of an intensive, controversial program in teacher education colleges. The article presents comments on teacher education, language, and competency testing in England, Wales, Brazil, Canada, and the United States. (SM)

Travel allows teachers to gather the data and realia to enliven history or global education in the classroom. In this special issue teachers describe personal travel experiences to many parts of the globe. Points of interest, itineraries, budgets, and artifacts collected are discussed. (RM)

Compares education of lower-middle and working classes in Brazil and the United States to examine effects of the educational system in supporting the changing technological infrastructure. Concludes that both countries need to improve access and minimize stratification to make their systems of education for mid-level technology more equitable. (DHP)

This series of articles cites a variety of sources and synthesizes a number of studies related to education and training efforts in both developing and developed nations. (SSH)

How German were German anarchists in the United States and Brazil? Did the experience of exile and immigration preserve or even heighten a national identity among radicals who openly espoused revolutionary internationalism? Anarchists distinguished between nation and nationality on the one hand, and the state and nationalism on the other. This article examines expressions of nationality by a handful of German anarchist editors and writers from the 1880s to the end of World War II. They wanted to be stateless, but not nationless. This article argues that German exile anarchists in the United States and Brazil expressed a militant, countercultural, antistatist and anticlerical nationality. They were 'rooted cosmopolitans': They identified with the international revolutionary tradition and at the same time remained attached to Germany's heritage of radical politics, arts and humanities. There was a remarkable consistency in their commentary levelled against Bismarck, the Kaiser, the Weimar government and the Nazis either in Germany or in the host country. Anarchists advocated for a borderless global federation of free communities and, to that end, rejected nationalism and urged people to stop 'seeing like a state' by exposing the false promises and crimes of statism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Metropolitana de Sustentabilidade is the property of Revista Metropolitana de Sustentabilidade - RMS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article critically examines the formation of the BRICS alliance, comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, with a specific focus on the pivotal role played by the United States in shaping this strategic partnership. It explores the extent of US influence and the accompanying responsibilities it assumes within the alliance. The article highlights the proactive efforts of Brazil, Russia, and China to expand their global influence while concurrently aiming to reduce US interference. Brazil, in particular, seeks partnerships with Russia and China as a means to attain autonomy and foster development. Simultaneously, Russia and China strive to challenge US global dominance and solidify their own spheres of influence. The article concludes by emphasising the importance of critically evaluating Europe's military support to Ukraine, suggesting that such support may primarily serve US interests. Additionally, it underscores Europe's potential to promote peace and stability by pursuing independent and principled foreign policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Papel Político is the property of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Papel Político is the property of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Contrary to what many may expect, this article argues that Brazil did a better job than the USA when it came to responding to HIV/AIDS. Because of the Brazilian government’s concern about its international reputation and the partnerships it has forged with international donors and civil society, the government has been committed to strengthening decentralization processes by introducing both formal and informal re-centralization measures that strengthen health policy devolution, while effectively targeting the biggest at-risk groups. The US, in contrast, has not achieved these objectives, due to its lack of interest in increasing its international reputation and its focus on bi-lateral aid rather than investing in domestic policy. The paper closes by explaining the lessons that Brazil can teach the US and other large federations seeking to ensure that decentralization and prevention policy work more effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper emphasizes the important changes in Brazilian foreign policy after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took power in 2002. The paper defends the idea that it is not possible to argue that there were deep changes in comparison to Cardoso's administration. However, evidence shows that new things are happening as regards the design of a more active and clear line of foreign action, which has led to institutional changes and to more incisive approaches to multilateral action. This is the result of both the political profile of foreign policy officers and the aims of presidential diplomacy. The hypothesis underlying this paper proposes that Lula's administration has not fully broken with the old administration's practices; however, the aims of global and regional integration are being planned more clearly and with a higher degree of activism. This becomes clear in three aspects of Brazilian foreign policy: The institutional framework, the practice of multilateralism, and foreign policy towards the South, the three topics analyzed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth in international trade in recent years necessitates a better understanding of customs and expectations in cross-cultural negotiations. While several researchers have sought to examine and detail the similarities and differences between select countries, their data have generally been obtained under neutral or unspecified negotiating conditions. However, issue importance, opponent (prowess, ethical reputation), and context (location, confederate awareness, urgency) can play a significant role in the use of negotiating tactics. This paper describes a study comparing the perceptions of one hundred and forty-two current and future business professionals from two emerging trade partners, Brazil and the United States, regarding the appropriateness and likely use of five categories of negotiation tactics under seven challenging or unfavorable negotiating conditions commonly faced by negotiators. The results indicate an overall conditional effect for both attitudes (perceived appropriateness) and intentions (likelihood of use). In addition, while no significant difference in perceived appropriateness was found due to country, there were differences in likely use due to country for six conditions-behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Brazilian immigrants are becoming a more visible minority and, although different from other Latinos (in a linguistic, cultural, historical, and ethnic sense), are usually either counted as Latinos, not included in the Latino samples or simply overlooked in research studies. It is essential to understand the stress and pressures they undergo and appreciate their singular perspective and culturally-infused experiences to meet their needs and improve their mental healthcare and quality of life in the United States. Aim: The aim of this review is to understand and describe the experience of Brazilian immigrants in the U.S., related to mental health, assessing what studies have addressed and what is still needing to be researched. Method: We carried out an integrative review of peer-reviewed articles published between 2011 and 2022 using PychInfo, PubMed, and Proquest, addressing mental health of Brazilian immigrants in the United States. Results: A total of 10 articles were included revealing the interest of a variety of fields and uncovering three themes: (1) mental healthcare needs (especially warmth and understanding of culture), (2) common sources of support and stress in the community and work, and (3) Socioeconomic aspects related to their mental health, including discrimination, work-life balance, neighborhood cohesion, and acculturation. Conclusions: Results may be useful to practitioners, researchers, and policy makers, who should be attentive to client's familiarity with the English language, their sources of support, spirituality, specific Brazilian traits, their feeling of 'being invisible', life in community, and their previous experiences with healthcare in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The main purpose of this study is to evaluate whether the COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated earnings management among publicly traded companies in Brazil and the USA. Design/methodology/approach: The authors analyzed the above-mentioned effects based on 22,244 observations of Brazilian companies and 139,856 observations of American companies from 1998 to 2020. The proxy used to detect earnings management based on discretionary accruals (DAC) was obtained by using the Modified Jones Model (MJM) (Dechow et al., 1995), with adjustments suggested by Kothari et al. (2005). In accordance with previous studies (e.g. Brown et al., 2015; Enomoto et al., 2015; Galdi et al., 2020; Huang and Sun, 2017; Roychowdhury, 2006), the authors also employed a second proxy to detect earnings management through real activities associated with unusual losses for fixed assets (property, plant and equipment (PPE)). Findings: The study's findings indicate that the discretionary accruals of Brazilian companies varied in a more accentuated manner during the COVID-19 pandemic, making it possible to deduce that a recent history of economic depression may entail greater incentives for earnings management in an emerging economy. In addition, the authors verified that the effects of the current crisis on earnings management proxies denote a signal that is distinct from previous economic crises, which may be interpreted as an attempt to postpone the effects of the pandemic on financial statements, especially those of the Brazilian capital markets. Originality/value: Unlike previous crises, this pandemic has led to direct restrictions on a wide variety of economic segments rather than indirect contagion due to anomalies in the financial markets, making it a phenomenon with the characteristics of a quasi-natural experiment for studies related to the quality of accounting information. Considering that both Brazil and the USA provide an opportune economic contrast, given their discrepancies in terms of economic growth over the past two decades, the researchers believe that there is an unusual opportunity to understand how earnings management can be an incentive for managers in environments where crises arose from natural causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines United States (US)-International Monetary Fund (IMF)-Brazil relations amid international financial negotiations in the late 1950s. Washington pressed President Juscelino Kubitschek's government into seeking loans conditional on the IMF's standby agreements to advance US foreign economic policy in Brazil. The United States' tough position persisted despite rising anti-US sentiment in Latin America and the potential damage to United States-Brazil relations, which demonstrates the continuity of US president Dwight D. Eisenhower's foreign policy. The case of Kubitschek's Brazil contributes to our understanding of the IMF's policies in Latin America, the United States' ongoing economic concerns and Brazilian foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Debates is the property of Revista Debates and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Examining the trajectory of Brazilian journalism and its academic mediations during the period 1945–1964, this article provides elements to identify what we would call the negative dialectics of intellectual colonialism. In the Brazilian press, the replacement of the French paradigm by the North American one was seen by many as progress, without speculation about the possibility of cultivating a native formula. Associated with the institutional modernization triggered by the 1930 Revolution, the model of news production imported from the United States was softly assimilated instead of being imposed on professionals. There was a "passive revolution". Rather than resisting new foreign influences, most of Brazil's first generation of professional journalists and academics exploited for their own benefit the opportunities that, not by chance, emerged from the situation created by the context of the Second World War. On the other hand, the modernization of the press, paradoxically, had no significant impact on professional training within journalism schools, which arose in Brazil as an annex to the faculties of philosophy verified at that time and, therefore, out of step with the pedagogical pragmatism and practical teaching that characterized academically journalism in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies investigating the effect of trade liberalization policies on transaction costs in agricultural markets are scarce. The objective of our paper is to determine whether Brazil became more integrated with reduced transaction costs after the introduction of MERCOSUR with respect to its main agricultural trade partners, Argentina (a MERCOSUR member) and the United States (a non-MERCOSUR member). Using a threshold vector error correction model (TVECM), we estimate the transaction cost, price transmission elasticity and half-life adjustments for the most traded agricultural products between Brazil/Argentina and Brazil/United States from January 1980 to December 2012. Our findings suggest a strong MERCOSUR effect, with lower transaction costs and higher price transmission elasticity when compared to a non-agreement scenario. Moreover, the variations of both parameters are highly heterogeneous across products, depending mainly on their degree of differentiation. From a policy perspective, elements such as the sources of comparative and competitive advantages together with investment policies, specific market regulations and agricultural subsidies, among others, are mainly what influence the extent of transaction cost and market integration. Our results show that Brazil has made progress but still has considerable room for improvement in reducing barriers to agricultural products and, as a consequence, to achieving the full benefits of the MERCOSUR agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a set of comparative data related to racial inequality in the United States and Brazil throughout the twenty-first century. Within the limitations of available data, we highlight four limited but important dimensions, that is, demography, education, the labor market, and earnings that illustrate racial inequality in both countries. In doing so, we aim to investigate and critically update Andrews's work (1992) on the last three decades with available data. Despite some improvements in absolute terms related to racial inequities, we show that in both Brazil and the United States, economic growth periods do not necessarily mean that income among blacks is catching up with that of whites. Similarly, in both countries, economic crisis and recovery phases are experienced differently depending on the individual's race. JEL Classification: D31, D63, J7, J15 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to discourses of multiraciality as leading to a future beyond race, this commentary looks at how multiracial discourses and symbols underline race. Taking an overview of multiracial discourses and identities in relation to Blackness in the United States and Brazil, this commentary examines the deployment of multiraciality to maintain white supremacy. Under global capitalism, United States multicultural discourses, and Latin American foundational narratives, multiracial peoples are often propped up as a solution to racism, the eradication of race, or reduced to racial binaries centering whiteness. The section ends with considerations of how fears of racial passing and fraud coincide with multiracial identities. Questions for further consideration on the nexus of political identities and racial identities are proposed in relation to multiraciality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a general analysis of the relations among United States and Latin America considering issues such as the questioning of the US centrality globally and in the hemisphere, Brazil's policies to the region and the impact of the growing relations with China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The current paper deals with the whole imagination of race in the work of a major American poet. The very subject of race intersects with the question of national identity, also neglected in Bishop's work, although not in the same way. The aim of the discussion is to align the racial text with the national text. How can we understand Bishop's consistent interest in race throughout her poetry, and what effect can be observed in it as a result of her exposure to racial constructs in Brazil that are so different from those of her native United States? We can see this effect manifest even in the controversy over her 1965 magazine article on the quatercentenary of Rio de Janeiro. What does this controversy demonstrate, finally, but that national experience with respect to race turns out to be mutually exclusive? One cannot be in this respect both Brazilian and American-in prose. In poetry, however, it is quite another matter. The subject of race is all of a piece, and has been all along conducted in Bishop's work according to a logic ultimately apart from national construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazil filed a lawsuit with the WTO against the United States for providing cotton production and export subsidies, and the WTO ruled in favour of Brazil. Brazil threatened to impose retaliatory tariffs if the United States does not comply with the WTO rulings. After a prolonged litigation stretching from 2002 to 2010, both countries agreed to a negotiated settlement wherein the United States paid Brazilian cotton producers to compensate for any adverse effects. This study develops a political economic model to theoretically analyse US cotton policies, Brazil's threat of retaliatory tariffs and the negotiated settlement between the two countries. The theoretical results show that the volume of cotton output, supply price response, politicians' apathy for the public welfare, elasticities of excess supply/demand and the magnitude of US transfers play a crucial role in determining US policies. This study contributes to the literature by being the first to model political economic aspects of the complex system of trade and domestic policies in the cotton industry using a three‐country framework, tariff retaliation and transfers between the countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]