We analyze by means of frontier methods (input requirement function) the relative energy efficiency of urban water and sanitation providers in Brazil. We estimate energy savings through measures the sector could implement on variables which control. We find a 63 percent efficiency average, with...

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is not a unique explanation for growth and progress, but is one of the more useful indicators of the open opportunities. It reveals preferences of the developed countries’ private sector, while the emerging economies seem to participate in a global bid. That bid...

The literature highlights the role of finance in growth. There is evidence on the connection (correlation and causalities) between deeper finance (banking and non banking) and growth. We ask if some countries achieve better results, in terms of growth, with comparable levels of finance. To...

With an early welfare system, Argentina’s demography is more similar to the South European countries than to the majority of Latin American ones. The country reformed its old fashioned Pay-As-You-Go system in the 1990s, introducing a Fully Funded scheme, which was intended to solve the...

Corporate governance could be defined as the institutions or mechanisms, which induce incentives in listed firms, in order to recognize benefits between all the stakeholders, and to restrict the discretion over that distribution, in presence of asymmetric information and incomplete contracts....

This paper is aimed to answer a set of questions through an examination of the literature and empirical evidence on annuities. Every section of the paper try to address one specific question, naming: How important is the ageing problem in the world? How is social security being replaced or...

Longevity is increasing in the whole world, and savings for retirement are growing quickly. There is a potential demand for certainty in the income streams for pensioners since old-fashioned pay-as-you-go systems became financially stressed. A financial product, the annuity contract, offers...

Inlfation targeting is a relatively new way to administer the monetary policy, since the velocity of money revealed unstable and hard pegs unsustainable. The new regime is one of flexible exchange rates, and the target of the monetary policy becomes the rate of inflation itself, instead of any...

Does a small economy benefit from having local financial intermediaries? If "yes", then what can be done to ameliorate the performance of local financial intermediaries? This article it is made a review on theoretical and empirical literature related with both questions. Two strands of the...

The aim of this work is to present in a systematic way elements around the debate on the persistence of a central bank arrangement, currency boards or the Dollarization option. In some special circumstances, both later arrangements could be desirable. They are not a universal panacea in the way...