Available “fundamentalist” interpretations of Brazilian inflation seem unable to explain why Brazil has such high rate of inflation with such a small public sector operational deficit. An attempt is made to explain this paradox with the use of the concepts of potential deficit with zero inflation and the inflationary erosion of budgeted government expenses. The conclusion is that the resolution of the Brazilian inflationary conflict involves the transfer, to local governments or the private sector, of a significant share of the current functions of the federal government.

This paper deals with the relation between institutions and stabilization problems. Its purposes is to demonstrate that the consideration of the institutions may provide answers for questions that the conventional macroeconomic analysis have not been succeeding in. The main questions is: why, in Brazil, from the beginning of the eighties onward, the inflation rate does not fall to a civilized levels but does not go to a hyperinflationary process? The approach is that provided by the “New Institutional Economics” (NIE) and the tentative hypothesis is that the formal indexation — a allocative institution created by the military government — (PAEG, 1967) — would have displaced the constitutive and fundamental institution, i. e, the money, the official currency. As a result of this process — a different process within Latin America because of the official and legal sign of the Brazilian indexation —, the recurrent rise of prices would have transformed itself into an institution.

This paper discusses some aspects of currency boards. It analyzes the formation of this institutions, the historical experiences of Singapore and Brazil and Lara Resende currency board proposal.

The promulgation of the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, reinstated the so called Usury Law. According to this old regulament, which was never revoked but that was made ineffective due to the extremely high rates of inflation that we have been experiencing since a long time ago, the rate of interest, in nominal terms, cannot exceed 12% yearly. Aiming to innovate, while at the same time ignoring the ever present law of supply and demand, the 1988 Constitution established that ceiling in real terms. The paper focuses not only on the difficulties of measuring the effective rate of interest that is charged on bank loans, but also on the almost impossible task of measuring it in real terms. The unavoidable conclusion is that this new version of the Usury Law will be also rendered ineffective in practice.

This paper utilizes the methodology of co-integration to test the theoretical proposition that there is a long run relationship between the trade balance and the real exchange rate. Several of the commonly used definitions of the real exchange rate were tested but none showed co-integration with the trade balance. The only measure of the real exchange rate that was co-integrated with the trade balance was the one defined by the relative price of tradeables and non-tradeables. The evidence is not inconsistent with the observation that the direction of causality runs from the real exchange rate to the trade balance.

The sharp contrast between the universal crises faced by the Brazilian economy during the 80s and the quite successful picture shown by the country’s agribusiness have been widely recognized. Amongst the positive aspects revealed by the sector’s performance, the remarkable capacity to attract capital from the Center-South to the frontier must be stressed. This article ‘s main subject is the expansion-cum-transformation of the Centro-Oeste agribusi-ness frontier. It also analyses the recent changes occurred in the Brazilian agricultural policy and the answers provided by the private sector.

This paper deals with the new competitiveness standards that are being set in contemporary capitalism by more cooperative environment among economic agents. It is argued that economic efficiency can be traced to contemporary forms of cooperation at grassroot levels of the social organization of production, pushing the arena of competition upwards. Even more efficient performances of flexible automation technologies seem to presuppose intra-firm and inter-firm cooperative environments, radically departing from previous conflictive relation standards of modern capitalism. So much so that one of the pillars of orthodox economics, namely the theory of the firm, have been undergoing profound modifications to cope with these new facts of contemporary economic life.

The Brazilian economy continues presenting the most unequal distribution of income among all countries in the world. The article presents the consequences of the growing disparities and considers the pros and cons of the introduction of a Guaranteed Minimum Income Program, through a negative income tax, as an efficient instrument to remove poverty. The second part of this work identifies an analytical structure which could reproduce the effects, on the level of the productive structure, of a process of Income Distribution. The aim was achieved as a result of the choice of an Input-Output Model which used an enlargement of the basic Leontief (1951) Model, from a derivation of social accounting matrix, as resulted in an estimation of the disaggregated multipliers for production, income and employment.

This article is a survey about the consequences of the credibility of government policies, one of the main developments in macroeconomic theory in the 80s. New classical economists used it to explain why, in the long-run, government policies fail when they intend to increase the level of employment above the natural rate. Even in the short run, they only achieve their aims if it is possible to cheat the private sector. The result will be to loose credibility and inflationary pressures. Other authors developed it as a tool to understand the relationship between government, political parties and pressure groups with economic policy. Finally, we comment some papers about the Brazilian inflation based on distributive conflict and compare them with explanations from credibility of policies.

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