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,...

This study will analyze the determinants of environmental performance in the Brazilian industrial sector. It uses a database conducted by the Brazilian National Confederation of Industries inquiring about questions on environmental management over 325 medium and large firms referred to the year...

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...

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...

This study presents a preliminary estimate of user costs of forestland conversion for agricultural purposes for the period 1970-80 in Brazil. In this initial version, only loss in potential sustainable wood output is considered. However, the analytical framework adopted here can be extended to...

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...