This report is a full assessment of Brazil’s compliance with the Insurance Core Principles (ICPs) of the International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS) as adopted in October 2011. In the last few years, the Brazilian insurance industry experienced an explosive growth doubling the...

This report is a detailed assessment of Brazil’s compliance with the Basel Core Principles. Brazil has a well-defined banking supervision process that grants the Banco Central do Brasil (BCB) broad enforcement powers to carry out corrective actions. The licensing process has been enhanced, and...

During the past two years Latin America has received sizable international capital inflows. This paper compares the recent experience with that of the late 1970s. The analysis examines differences and similarities between the two episodes in three broad areas: domestic macroeconomic conditions...

This paper examines a real interest rate targeting procedure based on lagged inflation similar to the policy followed by the Brazilian monetary authorities during the period November 1986 to December 1988, focusing on the issue of the determinacy of the price level. For the specific model...

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

This paper examines trends in income distribution in Brazil and the determinants of income inequality, including social expenditure. While recent data reveal reduced income inequality since the Real Plan of July 1994, the distribution of income is still among the most unequal in the world. Among...

Using monthly data for a set of variables, we examine the out-of-sample performance of various variance/covariance models and find that no model has consistently outperformed the others. We also show that it is possible to increase the probability mass toward the tails and to match reasonably...

This paper examines the sustainability of fiscal policy under uncertainty in three emerging market countries, Brazil, Mexico, and Turkey. For each country, we estimate a vector autoregression (VAR) that includes fiscal and macroeconomic variables. Retrospectively, a historical decomposition...

Under a monetary dominant (MD) regime, the primary surplus adjusts to limit debt growth, permitting monetary policy to be conducted independently of fiscal financing requirements. In Brazil, some evidence favors an MD regime for 1995–97, but not for the decade of the 1990s as a whole. While...

This paper uses Engel curves to estimate real income growth in Brazil. The estimated per capita household real income growth in metropolitan areas during 1987-2002 is about 41⁄2 percent per year, well above the ""headline"" growth of 11⁄2 percent obtained by deflating nominal incomes by the...