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...

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,...

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...

The main objectives of regulatory reform and privatization of infrastructure in Brazil were to attract new private investment, increase efficiency and reduce the public debt through the use of privatization revenues. Whereas the evidence suggests that regulatory reform (privatization included)...

This paper makes a partial assessment of the Brazilian privatization program in the 1990s. The article focuses mainly on the fiscal impact of asset sales, which, we argue, has been relatively small. We conclude that the failure of the government's stabilization attempts has reduced the fiscal...