Speech in the Opening Ceremony of the III International Conference Celso Furtado “Development in a Globalization Context”.

JEL Classification: 010.

Capitalism is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for democracy. This relation is historically contingent. It is true that democracy tends to prevail in the most developed capitalist countries. But this is not because capitalist development breeds democracy. The reason is that once democracy is present in wealthy societies, everyone has too much at stake to risk a struggle for dictatorship.

JEL Classification: O1; P1; P16.

The paper analyses a question that is very frequent in the academic debate among different schools of thought: the relevance of the liquidity preference theory under the new international and national financial arrangements. The main issue here is to point out that those new arrangements gave too much liquidity to non-monetary financial assets that made irrelevant the liquidity attribute of money; therefore, liquidity preference loses its meaning. The paper demonstrates that under Keynes assumptions, which support liquidity preference theory, this new arrangements emphasises and strengthens several motives for demanding money and not the contrary, reinforcing in this way the validity of the theory.

JEL Classification: B50; E12; E41.

It is presented a brief and tentative analysis of some political economy aspects of a tax-based incomes policy by building on some contributions from the political microeconomy and the political macroeconomy. Primary attention is paid to some political and institutional requirements to be met by such policies, while troublesome technical issues are dealt with only to the extent that they have a bearing on those requirements.

JEL Classification: E64.

For some economists, the IS-LM model is already past, corresponding to a remote phase of the history of economic thought. In this paper, we try to demonstrate that this is not necessarily true. At the same time, we take advantage of the model’s longevity to provide a brief account of some events in Macroeconomics. Also, we call attention for the increasing differences between “academic” and “practical” macroeconomists, a fact that may indicate the existence of problems pertaining to teaching and applications in the field. Despite all the model’s flaws, we believe that it hasn’t entered to the hall of historical icons of Economics yet and it may still be useful, at least in the sense of training younger generations of students with basic macroeconomic concepts.

JEL Classification: A2; A22; A23; B22; E1; E12.

This paper sets out to advance further in the development of a methodology for mapping, classifying and characterizing Local Production Systems (LPS) in Brazil. Such effort is justified not only for the importance these systems have been amassing for generating jobs and social welfare, economic growth, exports and technological development, but also for the attention they have received from several public organisms and private institutions, many times lacking adequate methodological criteria, resulting in dispersion of efforts and waste of both public and private resources. Therefore, the main goal of the paper is to provide evidence that allows rationalizing public policies administration criteria and private actions directed to LPS, offering suggestions for policies and actions differentiated according to categories or types of systems with distinct characteristics according to their relevance to local or regional development as well as their importance in the context of the sector in which they are inserted.

JEL Classification: R12; R58; O18.

This paper discusses the roles of the entrepreneur in the economic theory. The deficiencies of mainstream theory are pointed out and the forerunner contributions of Cantillon and Bentham are analyzed, as well as the different approaches of Marx, Veblen and Sombart. The changing role of the entrepreneur after the emergency of the modern corporations is discussed, following the works of Schumpeter, Penrose and Chandler.

JEL Classification: B10; B20; M13.

Mercosur has achieved important advances like the removal of intra-bloc tariff and non-tariff barriers and the establishment of a common external tariff for most products. However, its ambitious plans to deepen the integration process comprising harmonisation of policies in areas like competition policy, government procurement, technical barriers and phytosanitary measures have not been implemented yet. This paper examines Mercosur policies in relation to tariffs and other non-tariff barriers comparing them with their implementation, in order to examine the extent to which the proposals have actually been fulfilled.

JEL Classification: F13; F15.

This paper revisits Bresser-Pereira´s (1984, 1986, 2002) integrated analysis on economic development, technological progress and functional income distribution. That analysis combines pure economic theory aspects and historical aspects in an innovative perspective. Criticisms about the succession of phases of capitalism development tentatively advanced by Bresser-Pereira (1984, 1986) are offered, as long as suggestions for further research.

JEL Classification: 011.

This work updates, to 2003, the 1947-1992 series of inflation tax, inflationary transfers to commercial banks and total inflationary transfers previously published in Cysne (1994) and in Simonsen and Cysne (1995).

JEL Classification: E39; E59.

Testimony to the Committee of Economic, Industrial and Trade Development of the House of Deputies.