This paper analyzes export performance in Brazil, discussing the roles played by export diversification, productivity enhancements, policy, and natural resource endowments. First, we provide a brief account of Brazil’s recent export performance and analyze changes in the competitiveness of...

Based on three versions of a small macroeconomic model for Brazil, this paper presents empirical evidence on the effects of parameter uncertainty on monetary policy rules and on the robustness of optimal and simple rules over different model specifications. By comparing the optimal policy rule...

The last 20 years were a period of major political, economic, social, and institutional reform in Brazil. In the first half of the 1990s, reformers opened the economy to foreign trade and both direct and portfolio investment, sold off a number of large and traditional state-owned enterprises,...

Regulation in the sanitation sector in Brazil is facing a great deal of debate regarding the government level in which conceding authority should reside and how private operators can fulfill social objectives. The main objective of this study is to show that these issues are not the crucial...

The objective of our work is to study the term structure of interest rates and the sovereign credit spreads of emerging markets. We develop a model from term structure, credit risk and vector autoregressive models, based on the articles by Ang and Piazzesi (2003) and Ang, Dong and Piazzesi...

Financial markets help to foster growth and productivity through their role in mobilizing savings to finance investment and production, selecting and monitoring investment projects, diversifying risks, and allowing investment and production to be carried out in the most productive scale and time...

In the first part of the paper, we use translog indexes to measure the rate of total factor productivity growth (TFPG) in 80 different sectors of the Brazilian manufacturing industry in the 1970-80 period. In the second part, we conduct both correlation and regression analyses to identify...

The objective of this paper is to identify variables that influenced the efficiency level of Brazilian manufacturing establishments in 1970 and 1980. Efficiency is defined as the ratio of actual to best practice output, which is measured using deterministic translog frontier production...

In this paper we estimate the rate of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in 80 sectors of Brazilian manufacturing industry and use production functions to decompose TFP growth into technological progress and changes in efficiency. We find that growth of TFP was caused, in most sectors, by...