Rent seeking is well known, but empirical evidence of its effects is relatively rare. This paper analyzes the how domestic and international rent seeking caused Brazil to provide coffee export tax rebates that transferred foreign exchange to coffee importers. Although Brazil was the world's...

We posit that comparative advantage is discovered via alternative transactional regimes of trading. Transactional regimes are performative, based on different forms of embedded agency. The theory is applied on a study of Brazilian coffee business which manifests the increasing importance of...