This paper focuses on the recent development of the Brazilian financial system and its institutions. It begins by presenting an overview of the credit market in the post-Real Plan period. After stabilization, financial institutions had to be completely reformed. A very conservative and...

Monetary and fiscal institutions have played a decisive role in the stabilisation of the Brazilian economy since the mid-1990s. Brazil’s experience of designing and managing institutions to this end is likely to be of interest to other emerging and low- or middle-income economies. In Brazil...

Since independence Malawi has failed to translate initial periods of economic growth (growth acceleration regimes) into sustained long-term growth (growth maintenance). This paper assesses why this has been the case and what feedback loops have existed between growth, the political settlement...

This paper provides an overview of the status, sources, and forms of corruption in Brazil. While the country outperforms many of its regional and developmental peers on various corruption-related indicators, corruption continues to plague many areas of public life, most notably in regional and...

The Gini coefficient of labour earnings in Brazil fell by 20% between 1995 and 2012, from 0.5 to 0.4. The decline was even larger by other measures, with the 90-10 percentile ratio falling by almost 40%. Although the conventional explanation of falling returns to education did play a role, a RIF...

The paper explores theoretically and empirically Brazil’s tax revenue from a political and political economy perspective. The absence of ‘big bang’ reforms to the tax code and tax administration suggests that policy models are less directly relevant to explaining the rise in the tax/GDP...

This paper offers an interpretation of India’s recent political economy in relation to the longer-term history since independence. It argues that an understanding of both ideas and interests is required for this interpretation. While politics and policy are often portrayed in terms of a tussle...

The paper examines the growth of antipoverty transfers in Brazil and their role in securing inclusive growth. Since the turn of the century, Brazil has managed to combine improvement in its growth performance, by the standards of recent decades, with substantial, and arguably unprecedented,...

This paper examines the reforms and institutions that have, anecdotally and empirically, demonstrated progress in combating corruption in Brazil. Focusing specifically on the institutions charged with investigating suspected corrupt activities, we contend that institutional multiplicity – the...

Brazilian agriculture has grown enormously during the past three decades. An interesting aspect of this growth is the respective roles of family and non-family farming, and the seeming importance of this distinction to Brazilian agricultural policy, reflected in the existence of separate...