Micro-credit and micro-finance emerged in the 1970’s in some Asian and Latin American countries as an instrument for fighting poverty and social exclusion. Using 2006-9 portuguese micro-level data, we estimate the failure rate of Portuguese micro-credit projects as 18,4%/year. This failure...

This paper estimates residential water demand functions taking into account the block rate pricing schedule usually set by water utilities. The progressive pricing, although preserves the convexity property on the budget set, induces the consumer budget constraints be non-linear, what violates...

The accumulation of human capital plays a crucial role in growth theories and it is incorporated in the growth models in a very simplified way. Therefore it does not take into account the economic development process complexity. They consider that the amount of human capital is an important...

This study addresses a key challenge: to analyze the current coordination of the Bioceanic Road Corridor initiative to promote infrastructure integration and cooperation between the State of Mato Grosso do Sul, the Paraguayan Chaco, the NOA regions of Argentina and the ports of northern Chile by...

This paper aims to measure, using a difference-in-differences estimator, the impacts of the privatization of water and sewage services on child mortality in municipalities in the Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo states. We obtain evidence that privatization is associated with a significant decrease...

This paper aims at analyzing the relationship between economic growth and financial development on theoretical and empirical grounds. We briefly review the arguments that support the existence or not of a positive and causal relation between these two variables, as well as the arguments that...

A prática de incentivos fiscais à inovação é comumente adotada por diversos países com objetivo de estimular as formas na realização de atividades tecnológicas, sendo especialmente dirigidos as atividades de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento (P&D). O uso generalizado desses incentivos culminou...

This study addresses a key challenge: to analyze the current coordination of the Bioceanic Road Corridor initiative to promote infrastructure integration and cooperation between the State of Mato Grosso do Sul, the Paraguayan Chaco, the NOA regions of Argentina and the ports of northern Chile by...

Schooling attendance improved significantly in Brazil, mainly for primary schooling. Attendance levels however are still deficient at secondary level; where dropout levels also worries policy makers. This paper aims to estimate the wage premium for secondary education attained by young workers...

The aim of this paper is to estimate the effect of manufacturing Brazilian firms´ knowledge production on their conditional probability of internationalization. In this way, an empirical study using (i) microdata from World Bank Investment Climate, Brazil 2003 and (ii) nonlinear instrumental...